Fig 1.
In this tutorial we will use a simple method to create a character using Animation:Master from Hash, Inc.. For the most part this technique could be used in most modeling packages.
First lets create an outline of what we think the top of the shoulders should look like. Once this is done,
revolve the section. Figure 1 shows the revolved section.
Now that we have created the 2 arm holes and shoulders, lets start to create the chest and belly area. The first thing to do is to remove the bottom splines and control points. Figure 2 shows the area to be removed.
These are removed since we are going to extrude part of the shoulders down.
After selecting the points, press the delete key. Now you need to go and remove the dangling splines by
selecting each spline and pressing the "K" key (Break). Now select the Control Points that
are around the hole we just made. Figure 3 shows the points after being selected. Looks a lot like
figure 2, but we can extrude these points fairly cleanly.
Now we need to extrude this section downward. From this point on, how you create the character is basically left up to how you want the body to look. We will try to make a convincing looking human torso of the male gender. (I prefer creating female characters, since there is more challenges in creating the breast to look right.. but for now lets keep to a more simple design.)
Lets extrude the first time and then look at some of the areas that need to be adjusted before we continue
on with the rest of the torso. What we want to look for is areas that are forming Hard corners. Pretty
much when a spline becomes discontinuous at a point, even though the points are joined. Pay close
attention to the arm pit area and you will see what I am trying to describe. We what to achieve a junction
of the arms to the chest with out seeing joint lines. There will be some problem areas that can be tweaked
out so as not to be so noticeable, but we need to fix most of the problem now before we extrude any more.
Here in figure 4, I have shown a birds eye view of the area around the left arm pit. The arrows are
pointing to lines that need to be removed, then reinserted to avoid the hard edge.
After you have removed each of the splines, then put back new ones in the order they are listed in figure 4. What actually happens is that the new extruded splines become a single connected spline, and the splines 2 and 4 will now connect to the spline going over the shoulder. This leaves a problem with splines 5 and 6 not being part of a continuous spline and a possibility of some hard edges in this area. I think we can reduce the effect by doing some tweaking. If you render the model so far, you will notice that there seems to be a problem with a sunken chest… We will fix this by select the CP’s on the extruded piece and hide the rest of the model. Switch to the top view and pull the CP’s around until you start to get a chest shape.
DON’T go overboard since this is the top most part of the chest, which should be just defining the overall
shape of the chest. Lets look at this in figure 5.
You can now extrude the new section down a couple of times to make the chest and belly area. Remember
to adjust the section outline to make it more round in each section. Here is a Progressive render of
the torso that I did.
It may not look like much right now, but as we can quickly see there is no joint lines connecting the shoulders to the chest. Which is what we are trying to achieve at this point. You can also see the dimples around the arm pit area. These can be lessen by adjusting the control points or you can leave them alone for now, and see what happens when we make the shoulder joint smaller, later on.
Also at this point you can adjust the stomach and chest to make your character be fatter or more defined.
Now the next part is a real pain to get correct. For me anyway. The pelvis is not that hard to do but to get it to look good is the hard part. So to try and get the pelvis correct, lets create the legs first and then continue extruding our torso and make it become the pelvis. Yes, it will look like crap at first, but with a minor amount of tweaking it will start to take shape real fast.
The way that I will create the legs is much like creating the shoulders. In that a spline outline will
be used to create a revolved object. Then the top part of the legs will be rotated to form the outside
edge of the pelvis. Lets look at some leg…. Hmmm, that sounds better when modeling the female character.
Notice how the tops of the legs are tilted inwards. This will allow us to attach the torso to each control point around the leg hole. What will happen is the front and back of the pelvis will be smaller than the width of the legs, which when rendered will look messed up. So after connecting the sections we will have to go back and move the control points to make them look like a butt on the back and a smooth area on the front. (no anatomically correct stuff here Bub).
How to make the butt look good is really defined by your own likes and dislikes. The easiest thing to do is to pull the point out to make a nice curve from the side view, then from the back view, adjust the points along the X axis to give it a round appearance.
Lets see how this might look… really I am doing this model as I write the tutorial, so I am trying to
convey the thoughts I have when creating each part of the body to you.
Well it does not look too bad. There needs to be some more work on the rib cage area, which will also make the back look a little better. Also the butt area could stand a little more adjustment. But for a quick model this would work ok. I am planning on using the model in a scene that I have been thinking about and for the most part, the chest/back/butt area will be covered up with some sort of robe or armor. So it looks just fine for that kind of application. Another area of concern is the legs… these look pretty plain right now. So some improvement will be needed before actually using them. (This will be left as an exercise for the student. I always wanted to use that line!) More importantly will be adding the arms to the body. The arms will also be non-descript for now.. but you will get the basic points.
Another important point to bring out is the proportion of the torso to the legs. If you do not like the way it looks. All you have to do is select the CP’s that make up the torso and scale them in the Y axis. This will either give a longer body or a shorter one. Main thing is you do not have to recreate the model to get it to look correct. Just some translating and scaling.
Now to adding the arms. This will go pretty much like building the legs. In that we will revolve a spline
that is in the basic shape of the arm we want. Then attach the arm to the holes that are in the torso.
I would recommend playing around with the shoulder joint area to make it look less round.. If you want
the character to have huge shoulders then make them bigger. The next figure will show the character with
a set of arms attached to the body.
For the arms I lathed a spline to match the number of points in the arm hole… since we initially used 8 in our lathed section this was easy to. Make an outline of the arm and lathed. Remember to move the origin of the selected group to the center of the arm hole, this will make the arm the same diameter as the hole.
Next select the end circle of the arm closest to the torso, and press the delete, this should leave a bunch of dangling end points. BEFORE connecting the endpoints, select the whole arm and press CTRL-C to get a copy of the arm. You can now flip the arm to the other side of the torso, then press CTRL-V to retrieve a copy of the original arm.. Now go in and connect each arm to the torso.
You will notice that the shoulders appear more defined. The reason is that I flattened the arms a little in the Y axis, since our arms are not cylinders. Then I adjusted some of the CP’s in the shoulder area to help bend the arm with out creasing when we animate it.
There are a lot of things left to be done to this character, ie the face/hands/feet. But that will be another exercise. What I would like to do is show a few examples of how this figure can be transformed into different characters.. Here are some images of ways to transform the basic body.
Here is a quick change to a woman character.. The arms still need to be smaller, but the main thing to
note is that no new CP’s were added. Just adjustments to scaling, translation.
 Fig.10 |
 Fig.11 |
Here you can really see that the arms and hips need some more tweaking, but for a background character this might not be necessary. And any type of clothing would cover these problems also. As for the breast, to get more detail, you would have to add more splines to each. This would give a more round effect, and would be a must on any time of close up shot. Actually the biceps look like crap in this picture, they need to be scaled down in the Z axis, to give them a little better shape.
Lets look at another quick change character that can be created. The woman took about 15 minutes from the
original body we built.
 Fig.12 |
 Fig. 13 |
Here I have created a quick fat guy. Basically scaled the legs larger, made the chest smaller, and tweaked the heck out of the belly area. There still needs to be some smoothing of the belly, but for a quick change this works out real well.
Overall this basic body design allows for some major body modifications without distorting the underlying concept of the human body.
I hope this helps in creating bodies for your characters. Not that any of these are finished bodies, but each one could be worked on a little bit more and a nice body could be had.
Later,
Larry Fish