Very nice!
(one of these days I'm going to learn how to model organics, esp. faces ...
)
It isn't easy! At least for me. I find that there's a different mentality from making spaceships or furniture, a natural feel for "good topology" continues to elude me, but I'm determined to overcome my inadequacies in this matter. I think you personally will get a charge out of my next subject.
i like it wish I was that good at 3d modeling.
just out of intreast why are aliens running around nude?
Squirrel, I'm not that good at 3D modeling yet. I was just really lucky with the head and body so far. As far as nudity is concerned, I'd guess they just don't have anything worth covering up. But while I was making the body, I stumbled across a really easy trick to making clothing, so this fellow
might be dressed at some point.
Will abduct for food .,, ahhh organic models; where is the fun in that; how long did he have to sit still for you to model him?
This little guy's remarkably cooperative, although he does have to get out and move his saucer from time to time to keep the Air Force from tracking him down. And the neighbors are really afraid of me now that I have aliens visiting every night.
***
Anyway, like I said above, the hands are challenging. So I decided on a fresh start with them.
First, I laid out a simple template. I didn't waste time sketching out a reference for a backdrop ... I'm not a great sketch artist, and I find that as I work in three dimensions, my expectations about proportions and volumes changes. So I just did the whole thing free hand (that pun really was unintended), starting with a simple plane, then blocking out details two-dimensionally. Like so:
I tried to make this "accurate", but in researching Grays, I found descriptions ranged from three to six fingers, and the fingers themselves often have odd little details. Like suction cups or pincers on the ends. So I'm on my own here, and this little fellow gets four normal, though somewhat long, digits. Once I was satisfied with the proportions, I extruded the whole hand into the third dimension, giving me a very blocky hand:
Now this isn't going to impress anyone, especially with the talent around here, so some tweaking is necessary, rounding out the edges and starting to give the hand a more natural shape:
With the volume defined, it's time to give myself enough vertices to work on the details. To do this, I rely on Blender to do the work. I apply a subsurface modifier with a level of one. Subsurface modifiers smooth the shape of a mesh using a Catmull-Clark algorithm to interpolate splines between each vertex ... adding virtual vertices to the mesh. The existing vertices then become a sort of control cage for the virtual vertices and you can achieve smooth, organic shapes more easily. With the subsurface modifier applied, I tweaked the vertices on the hand a little more to get it as good as I could, then converted the subsurface into a real mesh (alt-c). Now, each of the virtual vertices become real ... and with an interpolation level of one, every one face becomes four. This results in a denser mesh that is easier for me to adjust. Have a look:
You can already see where I've begun to tweak the mesh around the knuckles, and you can probably see for yourself which edges need to be moved around to make this hand look more realistic. So I then began moving edges and sometimes vertices around to improve the shape and suggest bones and tendons. I cut the four faces at the top of each finger near the tip out, then extruded down and extruded up while scaling, then extruded while scaling to get most of each fingernail. I then filled in the holes to get a complete nail. Repeating for each finger. I cut more edges on either side of the tendons using the knife tool (k -- exact) so I could enhance the definition of the tendons, then adjusted the new lines one vertex at a time until it looked good. Sometimes, triangles formed -- the devils of good topology -- and I worked to eliminate them as best I could. Never-the-less, there were four triangles on the finished hand I just couldn't get rid of ... two on the top, and two in the palm. Speaking of the palm, I also cut a new edge into that so I could add detail to the thumb and "life line". Using loop-cut (Ctrl-r), I added more edges to better define the knuckles. Similar work went into the thumb. The finished result, given the same texture as the rest of the Gray (though you can't tell from this picture) is shown here:
Now I just have to attach them to the rest of the figure ... not an easy task, since this will certainly result in a lot of triangles that I'll have to chase down. I may have to rebuild the arms just to accommodate these efficiently!
