Workshop Tutorial - Biped Modelling in Maya

Maya's back! So after not touching maya for four months which was a little stupid of me, we dived back into it with matt. He wants us to do a tutorials like the bouncing balls from last year but this year it's obviously more complex, we have to mimic his alien character that he's made but try and do it completely right. So make sure it's geometry is correct, make sure it's easy to UV map next, remember to delete history etc... all the basics that sometimes we forget. As we were going through maya, placing image planes i seemed to remember how to use it like i'd been on it the day before, so it was great to just remember everything which i wasn't sure would happen or not, I feel much more confident this year about maya and what i can do, just gotta keep practising.

As usual i took screenshots of the lesson and my model as i continued to do it over the week and weekend - 

Here's the image plane's matt provided us to work from

FRONT

 SIDE

We took these into photoshop to use rulers on them, expand etc

here's how to expand if i forget

changing the height to 550 works better for maya too then the planes are about the correct size

after inserting them - resize to correct size, normally 28/28

spread them apart ready for modelling

you can easy turn cameras off here- 

look at the blue measurement to the right highlighted - make sure it's minus so that your object is infront of the image plane, this makes it much easier to model

how to easily add subdivisions 

and here's just a few screen shots of me modelling the alien, I will add more as i continue to model him

So at this point i started to get really stuck and Mary kindly helped and recommended some books to read, so i went to the library got a few and started to read up a little. I found myself getting a little lost so i decided to start again fresh and do it all at once. I get a bit distracted sometimes and then it's hard to get back into the groove, easier to do it all at once. 

So this time i tried to pay attention to where everything was going and i kept smoothing it to see how it would look in both preview's. As i continued modelling i found that i got to grips with extruding and thinking where things would go next easier. I need to work on getting the geometry in the 'correct' place though cause my model does look different from Matt's. So i need to work on proportions next time, i'm gonna continue to read these books to better understand where everything goes cause i'm pretty confused about it all. I also took screen shots, LOADS of screen shots throughout modelling to show my progress, so here they are -