My very first non-tutorial model. What do you pros think?
I am taking a Video Game Design class at my high school (senior year) and have done some animation work in tf2 last year but never got in to modeling. Our current project in class is to make a dolphin, texture it, make a seabed, a wavy water area, and animate it to swim. While the other students in the class are following a tutorial my teacher made, but I decided that it'd probably be easier to use what I've learned from a couple of 3ds max tutorials I've done and figure it out. I think it came out very well for a design with no guidelines except for various pictures I found on the internet. It took me about four days of classes that are roughly 30-90 minutes long each.
Any constructive ideas would be appreciated.
Sorry about the broken images, I thought that google docs images worked, but I guess they don't.
[ame]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TIcy0zlBRw[/ame]
Any constructive ideas would be appreciated.
Sorry about the broken images, I thought that google docs images worked, but I guess they don't.
[ame]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TIcy0zlBRw[/ame]
Replies
The video looks good.
I'm pretty pissed high schools have so many computer classes these days. All we had were keyboarding and desktop publishing classes and Visual Basic and Java.
Don't feel too bad, I only could learn keyboarding and QBASIC/Visual Basic at my high school.
Well. We were taught how to use word and excel. I'd have killed for Java.
you got word and excel!? I'd have k...well, no, but that really would have been nice.
Yeah, I didn't know that, I think they're fixed now. Sorry about that.
Not a bad start though.
What sort of guidelines are there to keeping polygons as quads? I tried to stay with four sides through the main body, but as I go to the blow hole, eye, and tail, I found it difficult to keep quads and had to resort to triangles and even a few pentagons.
There are ways you can re-arrange your edges to make quads if you have tris, or ngons. It just takes a little thinking, almost like a puzzle. Just try to keep your lines flowing smoothly with an even distance between them. And like previously mentioned you want the shape to be pretty close to what you want before you smooth, the smooth should just be there to do exactly that, smooth. Keep working at this and you will get it, it just takes practice.
I did a rough paintover.
Basically, the edge flow around the mouth was quite off. You want your edges to flow as smoothly as possible. You also don't want n-gons, like I said before. terminate the edges into other edges, which should be quite easy to do in most areas of your model.
You also need to rely less on turbosmooth for your modelling. Add more detail on your low poly mesh to get better results on the smooth mesh. Make the dolphins body rounder (which would be easy to do with the edges in my paintover) If you make your dolphin look more like a dolphin without smoothing, then I guarantee that your smoothed model will look alot better.