Quick Modelling Elephant!

[WesleyChandler]

Hey Guys,

I'm quickly modeling an elephant head and possibly the front legs. This is for my fiancé, Calista. She is going to compete in 11 second club again this August. All she need is a simple elephant that she can animate, the elephant would probably only do a simple expression change, from sleepy to angry. Doesn't have to be too realistic either, since shes using moom.

Calista's Concept. That would be the trunk of the elephant that the 'explorer' will discover.


I just started, and I would like to get some critiques if I can. Especially geometry flow so that it can be animated well! I wanted bigger eyes for better expression, but I'm not sure if I'm going to get this.

I have a deadline of a few days!

[shamaneh]

You have it coming along nicely. The only worrisome area I see is the mesh flow between the loop around the eye and loop around the tusk. You should put a strip between the two, otherwise you will get some kinks.

Otherwise, keep it coming

[WesleyChandler]

Ah, thanks Jason! I think I know what your talking about. I added 2 more edge loops to round out the tusk area. Does that work better? lol.

Any tips on smoothing out geometry to be more even? Like around the ear area? I was trying to use the 'relax' tool, in the sculpt geometry, but it doesn't really do a good job evening it out that well..

Ears and Legs added

[shamaneh]

Definitely looking better.

I'm not sure about quick ways to space the polys better. There are some tools out there that can help, but I am old school, I manually place everything.

Anybody else have any tricks, as I would like to know too!

[rsharma]

This is a cool script that "averages selected vertices, but tries to maintain the original shape of the object"
http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads ... -4499.html

[WesleyChandler]

Hey guys!

Heres another update. Slowly working away on this. I ended up modeling the rest of the elephant, not too sure where this elephant will take me. maybe I'll use it as an experiment to rigging 4 legged creatures =) I also wanted to take this into Zbrush and learn the ways of the Zbrush! Do you think the UV's are good enough for Zbrush? And is it good enough to maximize texture space? Any crits would be welcomed, thanks!

Uv'ed

[shamaneh]

Looking pretty good.

I think the feet could be modeled better, but from the animation concept, I don't think it matters.

As for the UV's, I would say you could tweak this a bit. First, you should through a grid texture on the elephant so we can see if there are any distortions and it everything is to scale. Even though we don't have that, I can say that the ears look a bit small (UV's) compared to the face. The ears of the model appear to be slightly larger than the face.

Keep it up!

[WesleyChandler]

So I haven't had much time to work on the elephant. But I was able to finish rendering and lighting and compositing for my fiancé's entry! For the texturing, I actually didnt texture it. I just used a bunch of shaders and connected in a way to get that effect! Thats why the rest of his body looks pretty bad lol.

Later on, I'll re-work the feet a bit more and re-layout the UV so that there won't be any distortion. Thanks for the critique!



Sorry, you cant click to play, click on this link instead to see it!!!

http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/august09/entry/8GrhQX/



She came in 7th place out of 188 entries!! Woohoo! Go Calista! =)

[shamaneh]

Fantastic work! I think it came out very well. Congrats on being in the top 10!