3D modeling part 3

 The next step in the 3D modeling process was creating arms. As I have mentioned in my previous post, for the arms I have decided to use the shape of a cylinder again. I started by firstly putting the two cylinders in the sleeves, but I did not create any deformations to the shape. I decided to do that next. At the beginning I wanted to establish the length of each arm and its general size. 

I had to compare the sculpture so far to the sketches I had prepared and think whether I want the arm size like they are on the sketches or would I prefer them shorter/longer. I needed to look in depth into that so I was satisfied with the proportions. When I was happy with it I needed to start shaping the hand. 

Shaping a hand is generally a little bit complex, because I need to shape each finger separately for the character. I was not quite sure at first how to approach the process. I decided to extrude the ending of the arm and shape the hand in it. 

As shown on the picture above, I needed to scale the hand down among the Z axis (the main vertical axis). It made the hand itself be more 'squashed' than the arm. I also added one more loop in the hand that created more vertices. I decided to do so, to be later able to extrude the thumb from the surfaces created. This helped me to keep a shape of a hand. 

The next step was getting some general shape of the thumb. 

Extruding the thumb in this way, helped me to get a general shape that I could later on work on and add more vertices to. Even though it does look a little bit silly in this screenshot, I knew it was only so I could get some sort of shape to manipulate. 

My next step was actually a lot more difficult than I have expected. I thought extruding the fingers would be quite simple because it is just taking a surface and literally extruding it. What I did not think about was that the elliptical shape that ended my hand was actually one face, not 4 faces that I could extrude. This made me think, how I could possibly cut the extruded volume. I did not think of anything that would work, therefore I had to go back a few steps and think about it again. I decided to explore tools I have not used before. One of those tools is called knife. The knife helps to add edges and vertices to places where there are none. I decided to first separate my surface with 3 edges and then extrude each of the faces separately. 

My idea worked very well. I was very proud of myself for figuring it out and thinking about using different tools. Now, that I know how to use the knife tool, I can see myself getting more comfortable with working with more complex shapes and volumes. I needed to create each of the fingers in this way and the work actually was not difficult since I knew how to work on it. 

When the fingers were extruded, I needed to created the bone structure in them. That means I needed to create another loop of vertices to bend the fingers lightly. I have also moved the vertices up where the fingers start to resemble the bones. For this process I mostly used grabbing, rotating and scaling tools in Blender. 

The hand in the solid view of the character actually looks quite nicely and I am happy with it. I have encountered some obstacles that I have explained in this blog post, but I am very glad that the hand looks like a hand in the end. I will still work a little bit on the fingers and try to make them look slightly more real, but as of right now I am very happy with this, even though it does not look completely perfect. 

With the second hand I have pretty much repeated the process, but this time I knew how to approach it so it was not so difficult. I am very happy with my work so far, I think I have been not only improving but also recording my process quite well and learning from reflecting on what I have done so far.