Thesis: The Blocking Model

This week, with many aspects of pre-planing getting to their final stages, I started to work in Maya. What I was creating is known as a blocking model for my character. A blocking model is relatively basic and used to establish the general shapes and sizes of what a modeler is trying to create. This helps us get a feeling for what the final model or scene will look like. I started with very basic shapes to get the size and placement of head, torso, arms, and legs all based off of my original drawings.

Once I had my shapes and placement established, I pulled away at the primitive objects and added in more and more detail. The image above is the more detailed result. This is slightly beyond the blocking stages and into the actual modeling stages: connecting body parts, adding hands, creating a detailed head. Setting up the primitives helped me get the shape of the body to better proportions.

This is far from a final model. The body took between 4-6 hours and represents the boys body under his clothing. Hopefully I can get his clothing to drape around his body well. The face took closer to 9 or 10 hours. Traditionally I model in a realistic style. It is shockingly difficult to create a stylized head that is not "scary beyond all reason." Much of that 10 hours was just slight sculpting back and forth. The slightest changes to the model would make it look far better, or drastically worse; it is not a style I am accustomed to. The head still needs a fair amount of refinement, and the body is still closer to a boxing model.

I was so uncertain of the way my model was turning out that I decided to test if my character had become a hideous monster, an abomination, a crime against humanity. To test his appearance, I took the image of the model into photoshop, used the hair layer from the initial drawing, and added some color to simulate what his skin may eventually look like. The results to this test are shown in the image to the right. It seems there is hope for him yet. This gives me a good idea of what changes need to be made to the model in order to get the look I desire.

Week Breakdown
Body - 5 Hours
Head - 10 hours
Blog  - 2 Hours
Research/Planning/Design Docs - 2 hours