Alien Soldier - More modelling progress - Back Tentacles

These posts are going to get pretty long now as we're getting into the real grinding process of modelling characters like this, I'll try to stick mostly to screenshots now as most of what you're seeing done is down to artistic skill. You'll notice that everything on the model is starting to come together quite well now even though none of it is fully textured yet. Before I move onto that entirely however I will want to tidy everything up especially before I start adding lots of detail on this character.

The legs still need work and I'll be moving onto to that next, for those who don't know topology is a phrase modellers use in regards to the neatness of the wireframe. So what that means is that if it's not in the shape of a grid, it's not good. Why? It not only interferes with how well the game engine can process everything it also effects the way a mesh moves and bends, this is exceptionally important for me as we have more moving parts than is actually normal for a character model with the tentacles and so on and the mouth in particular.

You see that mess of diagonal lines at either side of the mouth all converging to one point? That's exactly what we don't want, all of that needs to be a nice flowing grid like the tentacle behind the head you can see in this screenshot so what I will be doing in preparation for when I finally rig this model is I will be going through all of this and tidying it up. I also don't want to have to deal with this if I want to add extra bits on that would screw things up pretty badly so it's better to deal with it all now rather than constantly have to run into problems and start over.

In this post though, I'm going to to show how I added the tentacles at the back, oddly enough, I think I did a neater job of this than the mouth and the head, probably because the shapes were simpler to deal with.

I think I might make some modelling gifs next post because with this many screenshots it's hard for even me to keep a track of everything and keep the shots all in order, probably a better option but with this you can at least get a general idea of what I'm doing. It's a simple matter of the tentacles at least in just extruding, rotating and scaling according to eye and then after I get the general shape I smooth the shape by adding in more polygons.