2. Head, hands, cloth
(seamless modeling in Maya)

"This tutorials is result of my research work in the area of character modeling and animation."
Michael Bazhutkin is animator of video studio at Soros Foundation-Kyrgyzstan
web site: www.geocities.com/bazhutkin
e-mail: misha@soros.kg



Click on pictures for view of big pictures.

The boy is an exaggerated model of myself. It was made to illustrate and test my method of modeling what was described in Part 1. I am not going to describe it by words, I would rather show it in the pictures with a few comments.

1. Creation of curves (I have used �Snap to Points� mode to make extreme points of curves be equal).


2. Creation the surfaces on the curves� base (I have used Boundary tool).


3. Edit some of surfaces such as nose, lips and ears.


4. Conversion NURBS surfaces into polygon and combine them up to one object.


5. Creation facial muscles through doubling of initial model and following editing this model using cluster and Artisan Brush (Paint Weights Tool). For some of muscles Lattices were used. After all work was done use the Blend Shape.


6. Skeleton creation and skinning. Rigid Skinning for clothes and head was used and Smooth Skinning for hands (but though for all objects this method of skinning could be used).


7. Creation of locators and setting their attributes which allow to manipulate the character (in the most of cases Driving Keys are using for this operation).

8. Before rendering a scene, I selected all faces of body and cloth except eyes, finger-nails, hair and shoes and then applied Smooth. Also I have used dynamics of soft bodies for realistic flapping of cloth.