Saturday, March 19, 2011

Character Modeling

So this past week we started character modeling in Maya.  I find it rather interesting, especially considering before I joined up with my fellow future Game Design students, I was kicking around the idea of designing and modeling a creature for my final.

Despite teachers constantly talking about the importance of not saving over the same file, making new files so that you can always go back to a previous version if you bork something up, I regrettably rarely listen.  However in Maya, I can definitely see the usefulness of this.  Particularly because as you work on your model and make it more complex in order to get the shape you want, you do risk winding up with far too many vertexes to be able to work efficiently.  I know myself, and I know that I could easily end up with a mess of a model, too complex for a newcomer like me to be able to really work with it.

Over the past couple of days I've been looking at low poly models to try to get a sense of how complicated it would be to create our own zombies from scratch for our game.  It's interesting to see how people fudge details on models by using textures; why painstakingly model wrinkles, folds in clothing, curls of hair, etc. when you can simply texture it to make it appear as if those things are there?  Textures are powerful things, and I'd love to be able to add it to my arsenal of skills, however we've only covered some of the basics last term, so texturing is still a bit of an intimidating creature in my mind.

Thankfully I believe we'll be tackling that beast next class.

No comments:

Post a Comment