On Monday 1st March I will be giving a presentation at the Bradford Enterprise Academy.

I will be discussing my time in the games industry and the many companies I have worked for, plus my move into the freelance world.

Click the link below for more information, and to book your place.

Antony Ward Presentation

See you there!

There are a few ways we can tackle her shirt…

1. As we did with her shorts we could construct it from cylinders, then stitch it togeather.
2. Using a cube as a base we could construct the shirt the Box Modelling way.

For me there is only one way which will ultimatly save time too. We already have the shirt geometry in the scene, so why start from scratch?

1. Following the image below, first duplicate the main body model.
2. Next delete the areas we don`t need, so the head, neck and lower body. Just leave the area around the shirt.
3. At the moment this mesh is too complicated to use, so we need to optimize it and try and build in as many horizontal loops as we can. These will ultimatly help use when we create our creases and folds.

We have a basic model, but when you make your other models visible again you will see that the mesh intersects, or is hidden by Mandy.

A quick way to fix this is to select the vertices of the shirt and move them along their normals. This will scale them outwards, relative to each other rather than as a whole.

In Maya you can select this under the Move Tool attibutes, in Silo just select Local Move.

There we have the basic shirt model, so next we can start to add some details.

As you can see below I`ve done some more work on her shorts, including adding some more creases to her inner thigh.

With the main bulk of the fabric done we can turn to the belt and belt loops. For the belt simply start with a cube, position and scale this to roughly belt shape then extrude the edges, moving around her shorts from one side to the next.

For the seam down her leg I duplicated a face loop down the thigh then split it into two. Selecting the new split I then created a bevel, which in effect made the new geometry have three divisions.

I then deleted the outer face loops so I was just left with a slim strip of polys, these I then extracted outwards to create the relief of the seam.

I did it this way to keep the seam running parallel with her shorts.

We will come back to the shorts later, so next we will turn to her shirt.

Time to make a start on her clothing.

As always its important to gather reference on folds and wrinkles before you start.

I have decided to make my first deviation from the concept and instead of Mandy wearing trousers she is going to wear shorts, mainly so we can see more of the leg geometry.

We start with a simple cylinder and position it around her thigh, duplicating it for the other leg.

With these in position we can start to stitch them together and work in more of the upper parts of the shorts, the area which is pulled down.

With the main bulk of the geometry in we can now build in some of the creased and folds.

While doing this also add in the edges of the cloth, and any other details like seams. These small touches make all the difference.

Make sure the pulled area actually looks like its holding some tension, keep it as streight as possible.

We will move onto adding the belt next before doing any final tweaks and details, then we will tackle her shirt.

A small update here, but once we are happy with her head and expression we can reattach her head.

This doeasn`t mean the body is final, we can come back to her and tweak it if we need to. For now though we will move onto clothing.

I have also uploaded the model for you here - Mandy Whole

I am ashamed to say I have fallen for the hype and opened a Twitter account.  I thought I would give it a go for a while and see how it pans out.  It might prove useful for sharing tips etc.

So, if you want to follow my ramblings please go here - http://twitter.com/ant_ward

Now we have our main head built we can think about her facial expression. Again, we can add this easily using the reflection/mirror tool so we only need to work on one side of her head.

I also added in a set of teeth I built for an earlier project. I will upload these, as well as the current model when we have completed the next stage and re-attached her head

I have started working on the head, tweaking the existing model so it looks more like Mandy.

Its difficult to get an exact likeness when working from sketches, as they rarely match up meaning the side is different from the front, especially if the faces have expressions. I was glad then to find the following set of images.

Having an actual 3D model to work from is great So here is where I am now…

Hi all and thanks for the feedback on the forums guys, its great to have you on board

I have now more or less completed her body, and I decided to delete the hands and feet as we don`t need them anyway.

I will probably come back to her again later but for now its time to move onto her head.

Before we start the head its a good idea to compile a reference page, like the one below. This has all the main views of Mandy so we have an idea of what she looks like from all angles.

I decided to scrap the posed head. Going back to the original, unposed head will make it much easier to work on while we get the look of Mandy nailed down. So bringing in the original model, delete the body and prepare the scene by importing and positioning the image planes.

Now we can rework the base head to fit Mandy, and reverting back tot he unposed model means for now, we can just concentrate on half of her head.