Alien Soldier - Modelling my concept art in 3D, first stage

So this is going to have a few parts to this because it is actually quite a big project i'm undertaking as I'm making a fully animated 3D character. First I'll be showing you the most obvious step, the modelling itself, where you actually take a shape and start molding it in 3D to match what you have drawn. Then I'll start doing some texturing because otherwise you'll be looking at a lot of grey and wireframe all the time and that's rather boring. Then after that I'll show you the rigging process, this is where you build an actual skeleton to 'bind' your character model to and that takes care of all of the movement and there is also a tool in Maya called a weight painting tool and what that does is it takes care of the way the bones actually interact with all the individual parts of the model. It's something I only learned about fairly recently after coming back to 3D and I'm sure with the fact I have tentacles on my character it will present an interesting problem.

Be warned, the next few topics I make are going to be long, so you should only bother checking this out if you have an active interest in how 3D characters are made or at least how I'm doing it. A big thing in 3D modelling is topology, so I'm probably going to have to do a lot of fixing on this character before it can go into the game engine and be animated but we'll see how everything goes.

So I've started taking screenshots a bit far ahead because I am starting off from a really standard 'human' model template that I had created for myself awhile back while I was studying how to draw characters. it was good enough to use as a base so I decided rather than constantly having to mess around with getting a basic humanoid shape why not use the assets I already have? Especially since I'm going to be warping it all and making it look really alien and monstrous anyway. So I got started first on the arms and began messing around with making tentacles and the mandibles too, I found out what the proper word was for those mouth pincers on an ant were by the way and I that's some basic knowledge I forgot too.

Fucked up the placement of the mandibles here but I fix it later on as I work and get into the flow of things, this is why we use reference and in this case my reference was the concept art.

You may notice with me recording more of what I'm doing now that I'm pretty chaotic in how I work, everything eventually falls into place though and you can see what I'm doing once it's all finished, here I'm working on the helmet detail and extruding polygons to give my model more bulk.

I'm not going to wuss out on the detailed areas either, here I am working on the mouth, I'm not a hundred percent sure on how I'm going to fix the topology but we'll see what happens. When it comes to 3D work a lot of it is just down to experimenting with what works and what doesn't, I'm not sure how the hell I'm going to animate the mouth when it's so small though. I may need to investigate rigging further in order to see if there are any options.

Here's what the mouth looks like up close now that I've done the main modelling work, pretty close to the concept art right? One of the nice things about how 3D modelling and game engine technology has progressed is you really don't have to compromise the art anymore in order to get things into a game. That being said, I will be keeping an eye on the polygon count and so on so it doesn't completely fuck the game up.

That's it for the current update, I will be posting more as I make more progress hopefully within a few weeks you'll get to see this alien fully textured and actually roaming, I'm probably going to arm him as well but I have no idea yet how i'm going to get the tentacles animated properly and gripping the gun realistically.

As you can see, I still need to do some proper work on the legs and make them look correct according to the concept art and I want to do more work on the armour and so on, I think though quite a bit of it will be down to texturing. Luckily however I had the sense to do a lot of studying on drawing this time round so I should have no problems finishing this thing.

Some people who don't know about games development may be wondering why I've stretched his arms out the way I have by the way, well that's actually a standard modelling practice. This makes it a lot easier to edit all the polygons on the arms and hands ( In this case tentacles ) because otherwise if the arms were squashed against his side it would constantly get in the way of modelling.