CAGD 330 - Presley Blog 3

The past two weeks I have finished laying out all of the rough shapes for my "Presley" robot model. I am struggling with speeding up my process however I am achieving a really nice look that I am happy with, here I'll discuss some mistakes and what is going well.

This is where I am at with the Presley model so far. All of the shapes have been laid out to start detailing. I was given advice to do this part first so that I could be sure my proportions were correct, which was a great suggestion and I'm glad I pursued this. I ended up tweaking and changing lots of lengths, placements, and rotations throughout this process, so I'm glad I don't have any details that I have to completely restart due to a bad placement.

However I still fall into tunnel vision and pits when I am modeling. You can see in the hips area of Presley I once again got too caught up in details, which cost me a lot of time and wasn't necessary. This even resulted in me detailing something with the wrong proportions, for example, the ring on the side of the groin/hip armor. This original placement was centered and far too big compared to the reference, and you can see where the groin armor was previously indented to fit a larger centered ring. I now have to go back to fix this, so there is some wasted work associate with this.

Above you can see how this occurred. While the ring is now in a better place the indentation I made for it is far too large and in the wrong position.

However a lot of other things went very well with this project, I'm excited on how the arm is turning out. For sections that aren't visible in the reference I am using human anatomy and distorting it to achieve a similar style so the robot looks cohesive. A great example is parts of the arm and legs.

There are lots of much smaller parts on the robot such as around Presley's neck and torso. I have left these for my detailing phase, and replaced them with a larger shaped torso piece. I will use tube brushes and smaller subtools to decorate and achieve the detailed look of the torso. I think doing this now would conflict too much with the proportions I am attempting to achieve now.

Finally I wrapped up the hands with the Zsphere and built the most complicated base mesh for this project, the leg "stilts". I build these in Maya. I believe I could have achieved this in Zbrushs' ZModeler brush however I am still not that accustomed to it and it was much faster in Maya. This mesh will require very little editing or sculpting in the future. I likely will add damage and some small details in the detail phase.

Next week I plan to start my detail phase by organizing all of the subtools in my project. I then want to tackle the torso, back, and neck by laying out all of the pieces. If I have time I also hope to start detailing larger pieces of the robot, such as the arms, legs, and chest, or finish the back of his head. There is a lot to do on this robot, and as I continue to work all of the intricacies reveal themselves to me. However I believe the final will turn out amazing, and I am not cutting corners by any means as I want this robot to look impressive.