Update on Alex (CG Version)

I have been working on both Alex and the Dragon in Maya, over the past weeks I have finished with alex's shape and I am rather happy with the outcome, I may have to do a tweak here and there next week., but next week will mainly be about creating a face for her, which will be a new thing for me as I have never made a face in Maya, I am sure it will be interesting to say the least.

As for the Dragon I did start him off in Maya, but because I haven't spent a ton of time creating him as of yet, I have taken the advice of my technician and have a go in Z-brush which is a program which acts in layers like Photoshop but in CGI world rather than a 2D one that Photoshop uses. Z-brush is also better than Maya in making very detailed and refined CG models and since I want to be a modeler I thought it would be well worth a shot plus I get to use a new program which might help me later on in my life.

Here are a series of Screen shots of me creating Alex in Maya, you will see me starting with a blocky head and slowly fleshing it out until I got my almost final result the final moments of Alex in terms of her mesh will be when I add the eye balls, mouth and nose. I still need to texture and her.

 A lot of the work at this stage was to just clean up the wire framing of the mesh so it would when texturing comes later on and rigging the mesh will bend and react in the correct and best way possible by having a mesh that is not messy.

Here I was nearing the end of shaping out Alex's mesh body and when merging together the different shapes I had to be careful of missing points in the mesh that needed to be merged together.

 Here is one of those points that I missed earlier on but found and addressed the issues as it was causing neck line to distort.

 Alex's mesh here is all cleaned up and I have placed for extra edge loops around parts of her body were a joint will be so when I add a rig and bind it to her body the bends in the mesh will react better.

This final image is Alex in with a early rig put in place, I think I might have to start the rig over again though because I have not placed any clavicle just before her arms, which this will effect any subtle movements I want to do with the arms.