I have the need of a fully rigged Mech model, for a couple of reasons, so I’ve started working on one. Figured I would document the process as I go. It’s somewhat of a background task, so don’t expect a whole lot of speed. This isn’t a tutorial either, look here for that, just a documentation of my process. Hopefully some of you find it worthwhile, while I am sure some of you will find it cringe worthy!
Here, are the humble beginnings:
One of the challenges all modelers face is where to start? I had trouble deciding. Generally if I stat with a limb, I struggle a bit with proportions going forward, so this time I decided to start with the torso and upper legs. Of course details are going to be added as I carry on in the process. Currently we are sitting at 390 faces. Ultimately I want to be in around the 5,000 mark. There are several easy points of optimization here. The eagle eyed viewer may also spot my first mistake too.
I always try to work in quads only, but sometimes corners just turn into triangles like this. Look what happens if we apply a couple sub-divisions around this corner:
It’s not the end of the world, but not as clean as I would have liked. In this case though, it still leaves me with proper edge loops in both directions, so I am not to phased about it.
So, where you might ask, is the concept art? This is a good point and generally I would sketch in a front and side view, like I did in the Blender tutorial. That said, for reasons I can’t bring myself to understand, whenever I do this with pen and paper, I just end up ripping off existing designs. So in this case, I’m just going to wing it, although when it comes to the cockpit area, I may have to reconsider.