For this assignment, I decided to model Bomberman. Now, I will take you through the steps of which I took to eventually achieve the model shown at the end of this post.
This assignment took me three days to complete but I will compile everything into one post, stating when and where I stopped for each day.
Day one
I started off my creating planes 640x480 and attaching my pictures to it by "assigning new material".
After which I arranged them to positions that I preferred and started modelling. I started off with the round body which I created through resizing a sphere.
Simple! After doing that, I had to do the ball which is launched from the stomach. I hid the body and created another sphere and likewise, positioned it based on the pictures which are used as guidelines.
I usually position each piece according to the front and handle the proportion of it by the other sides. After which, I "showed" the body and positioned them accordingly.
Initially, I tried using boolean > difference but I realised that the ball fitted snugly into the hole in the stomach and thus, there was no need to do so as there was no spacing at all between the hole and the ball. After the debate, I decided to call it a day.
Day two
Moving on from where I ended, I decided to do the head, where I simply created a cube and smooth it to give me the shape I wanted. It seemed odd at first but I soon realise that the angle of which I took the picture was not front but a little above and eventually, I decided to keep it as that.
Next, it was the arms. I hid the body and head and started working on the arms. I simply created a sphere and two cylinders of which is arranged nicely and scaled accordingly to achieve the results below.
Thus far, I feel like I am building a lego model, simply making simple polygons and arranging them accordingly. After doing the arms, I went on to the feet which was the tricky bit.
Ultimately, the best solution I could come up with was by bevelling the edges of a cuboid a few times, like so..
followed by trying to achieve the foot shape by extruding and rescaling of the faces and edges, ensuring that I pressed "3" to see how it looked like when smoothed. When satisfied with the look, I rotated it sideways to fit the picture that was used as a guild line for the bottom of the model.
I continued experimenting, extruding and smoothing, to try and achieve the desired look. I extruded the bottom to give it a flat like base and moved the top upwards to make the shoe looks bigger.
Finally, I created a duplicate of that "shoe" and rotated it to fit the other side. I added a cube in the middle to create that "one-piece" look.
Now for the actual legs. I simply created two cylinders and positioned them accordingly.
After everything, I "showed" everything and ended day two.
Day three
I went on to do the detailing of the stomach where it looked like there where two lines across it. I tried using the insert edge loop and extruding the faces as well as bevelling and extruding. None of it worked. In the end, I settled for boolean > difference, where I created a Torus, positioned like around the model and scaled it down so that only a portion of it is "inside" the model. Finally, using boolean > difference, I removed the portion that is overlapped giving me the design I wanted.
The last thing I had to do was the back. This was the trickiest of them all in my opinion. I first created the head piece which was simply a sphere and a cuboid linked together. The hard part was the hollow area. I made a cube, smooth it and extruded and scaled various points to finally achieve the shape below.
After which, I positioned it at the back of the head and used boolean > difference, giving me that hollow look.
With that, I was done with all the pieces.
Finally, I repositioned everything again, scaling some of the pieces to its appropriate size as the four pictures used as guide lines were not of the same size, eventually, getting this final product.
Extra work
I went ahead and played around with Maya, putting in colours and textures. Having learnt that Anisotropic was that of plastic, I went ahead and used that, changing the colour, ambience, angle, etc. Eventually I got this.
And this is how I did my model.
Research
Before doing this assignment, I did research for material, only the realise that I simply could not find any. Being so, I decided to consider what information I was lacking. Through the maya lessons, I was taught almost everything I needed seeing that my model is simply an arrangement of shapes as well as boolean> difference which is also taught. However, I felt that the shoe would be a problem for me and thus I searched for ways to do it and found this
Through this I learnt that instead of presetting the values for bevelling, I could extrude and scale it several times to get the same effect as a bevel. Through this knowledge, I was able to experiment and instead of extruding many times, I tried bevelling several times and by combining both of them, I was able to create the shoe of Bomberman. Without this, I am sure that I would have lots of trouble modelling it.
Self Critique
Looking at the pictures shown above, I feel that my work is not too bad, out of the four views, only one, namely the side view, was obviously different to that of the actual model.
Whereas the others were still quite good. Looking at them, I feel quite happy that they look rather similar to that of the real thing.
Having said that, part of me is quite upset with my work as in all, after much comparison with other course mates, I realised that my model is quite simple seeing that most of the time I am simply repositioning pieces and creating pieces. It is only about two steps did I struggle to find ways to achieve the desired look. Take this image for example.
This was considered to be the hardest task and looking at other people's work, this is only a small problem to them. Here, I spent about an hour experimenting with different ways to achieve the hollow look, from cylinders to a boolean > union of a sphere and a cube. There is hardly a proper way to find ways to improve on this as this is ultimately, how the model actually looks. It seems that my choice of toy also affected the amount of effort I seem to put in.
Despite saying that my model is quite similar to that of the real model, it hurts me to say that I feel that I did not put in enough effort. If other course mates could model objects to the extend that it looks identical, despite them being much more complex then mine, why am I unable to? Truth be told, part of the reason is because I am lazy and another, because of my lack of art sense which I feel plays a key role in this assignment.
A final observation which I noted was that of colour.
comparing it to that of the Nerf-Gun on this website: http://in3dp11xuanhao.wordpress.com/ which is that of one of my course mates.
His work is extremely well done, well modelled and coloured with as much precision as possible. It can be told that he put in a lot of effort into doing his work. Mine on the other hand seems to be rushed and with little effort spent. Firstly, I did put in effort in doing this however I feel that my lack of art sense caused my downfall. I feel that instead of trying to duplicate the model which is quite dirty. I should have made it look more bright looking to attract the viewer's attention. Also, I could have tried to better arrange the angle of the light reflection to give it a more realistic look.
Ultimately, I do rate myself a 7/10 as my task was to create a model similar to that of the real thing. My model is indeed quite similar and I have graded it based on that. However, if I were to take into account how much effort it looks like I put into this, I would give myself a 5/10 as although I did try my best to create a nice piece of art. My lack of skill prevents me from doing so and made my work seem as if I did not bother to do it properly.
