3D modeling part 4

 In this blog post I will further elaborate on the process of modeling the legs and the feet. After finishing the legs I am just left with the hair and doing all the touch-ups and then adding materials (colors) to the model. 

Legs were generally a very simple shape. Since legs are pretty much just cylinders. I started by adding a cylinder and positioning it like in my sketch, but this time I made sure to check bot front view and the side view. 

These cylinders had to be smaller on on the end close to the foot and wider on the thigh because this is how legs look. I also needed to create a loop for the knee. I did not want to create a very complex knee for now. I decided that if I want to make it more complex later, I can always go back to it, but for now I decided to make the look a little bit wider and create another loop for the calf. 

In the screenshot above I have simply widened the knee loop to make the transition from the thigh to the calf more visible and then I thought more about the muscles that there are in the legs. I created another loop, just below the knee one and decided to work with it to make the legs more believable. 

At first I decided to scale the loop up, but after doing that I realized that it was not a good idea because the legs looked worse. Then I came up with the idea to only scale it across the Y axis and then to push back the vertices from the front of the model. By doing that I got the specific bump that represents a muscle in the leg. I am glad I have decided to do that even though it did take me a lot of time. I think it not only shows that I have considered anatomy of a human but also looks more natural. I like it a lot this way. 

At this step I have noticed a mistake I have made. I forgot to change names of each of the cylinder I have added and as visible on the top righthand corner, there is a lot of just cylinders to work on. I should have named them 'sleeve', 'left arm', 'right arm' etc.. Forgetting to do so created a lot of confusion in my work process. This is a habit I do not have and I really need to work on. I often catch myself on working on unnamed layers or like in this case unnamed shapes. This makes the work a lot more difficult and sadly I still tend to forget about that. I am glad now I have really noticed the problem and I will try to make sure that I do not ignore that in the future. 

The next step was modeling the feet. Generally before I start working on the shape, I need to think which basic spacial geometric shape I want to start with. For many parts of my process I have worked on cylinders but this time I thought that a cylinder is not the best choice for the feet in shoes. I decided to apply a basic cube and add a lot of vertices to it to be able to work on it and make it in a more 'shoe shape'. 

I placed the cube under the legs so the whole end of the cylinder is on the block. After I was happy with that I decided to extrude it. I chose extruding instead of grabbing and moving vertices because when extruding I am adding vertices, so I have more tools to work on the shape I want the foot to be. I tend to make the feet a lot too small for a human, so I really had to push myself to make them big. I do not know why every time I draw or model a foot, too comes out too small. That exact thing happened with my 3D prototype. It simply turned out a lot too small so, I decided to really try making it big at first and then if I thought it was too big I would make it smaller then. 

After extruding the foot, I have added a few more loops to give myself more possibilities to shape the mesh to something that at least resembles a foot or a shoe. I worked on the wire frame because it lets me also works on the vertices that are on the other side of the model. Once in a while I would turn of the wireframe to see how it looks when solid. I have already learned that sometimes something that looks good in the wireframe turns out to look not so well when solid, this is why I check quite often. 

In this screenshot I am presenting the effect of working on the wireframe only. Because of that I did not notice that I have manipulated the vertices so much that the base of the leg was no longer touching it. I think that this screenshot illustrates perfectly the side effect of not checking how the piece looks when solid. I have a habit of checking how it looks so I can quickly correct myself without losing a lot of work. 

When working on the foot I had to do a lot of scaling it all up and down. I wanted to constantly make it smaller, because the size looked ridiculous to me, but then when I was viewing the entire character, the foot was a lot too small. I needed to really think about it and try different sizes to establish what I liked the most. I think experimenting with sizes is important and it is especially good to do when working on vertices because by scaling objects up I do not lose any resolution so I can do it as much as I want to. 

This is what I finished the work with. The feet are far from perfect and I am planning on still working on them to get them to the shape I will be happy with. I am quite disappointed how spiky they look and I know I will need to add a few more loops to add vertices to make the shape more circular. This is something I will be working on in my touch ups stage really soon because the deadline it approaching faster than I would want it to come and I will really need to prioritize what is more important to fix and what I can live with.