Pui Pui Entry 1
I don't have much time right now, but I wanted to get this started.
For the longest time I've wanted to model Pui Pui from DBZ. I don't why.
I just like him. He was only in a few episodes, and was quickly dispatched
by Vegita with ease. Poor guy never knew what he was up against.
I'm sure I could have modeled most of him from memory, but my main problems
would have been his armour and head. At the very least, I need pics for
those. Well, I *finally* found a few that I can work with. Not the greatest
pics, but they will have to do.
I've already put some thought into this and made some decisions.
I guess the first thing is polycount. I'm gonna shoot for around 2000,
and that's a lot for me. To compare, my Eustace Banks model has around
1098 faces.
He'll have 3 fingers with 1 joint, the first knuckle. The ring and pinky
will be one finger. The joints will be 3 semi-slices -- two on top and
one on the bottom. The index and middle will be six-sided. Flat sides
on top and bottom. The pinky/ring will be similiar, but with an extra
step, so to speak. So I've found my compromise with the fingers. Enough
detail to suggest shape and movement, but not so much as to be wasted
in the rendering. This is my compromise.
My other big concern is his armour. This is going to be a pain. It's
definitely going to be geodesic, but getting it started is the real tough
part. I think I'm going to start with an oil tank primitive, toss a quick
texture on it showing the breaks in his armour, then get busy with the
verts.
Once that's done, everything else should fall into place. Arms, legs,
boots, gloves -- shouldn't prove to be any problems. Even his head should
be cake now that I have a reference or two.
Although, I'm not sure what I'm going to do about his crotch just yet.
The crotch always causes me some problems. I think I just have to get
more experience with rigging this area.
For his face, I'm going to try something a big different. I want to morph
target (weight map) his expressions, but I don't want to have to copy
the whole mesh just to tweak his face. So, I'm going to do it as a seperate
object, then link it to the skull. Since his head is going to be rigid,
this should work just fine. Hopefully this won't cause any clipping problems.
Definitely make for an interesting work flow with modeling, UVW mapping,
and keeping it all straight.
When I get the time, I'll toss up some pictures to show some of the stuff
that I'm talking about. And, since I'm busy with being a father, this
will go kind of slow.
Lunch time for the little ones.
Gotta go.
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