With the orthos, or image planes, loaded into my front and side views, it is time to begin modeling. The first step is to place half a sphere into the side view with the poles at the top of the head and bottom of the pelvis. What we are going to do is model the entire head (including eyelids, nose, ears, mouth), neck, torso and pelvis out of a single half sphere. When modeling any humanoid form, this is the way to go, especially for the head. Any other technique can seriously slow things down, maybe not while modeling, but definitely down the road when setting up deformations or sculpting morph targets for facial animation. When this geometry is complete, we will then attach arms and legs with the Fillet Blend tool.


Figure Two

With the sphere in place, we now want to shape it to match the general forms of the Image Planes, starting first with the side view. A feature of Maya which makes this and many other common tasks more intuitive are the new manipulators for modifying objects. When an object is selected, as in Figure Two, with a translational tool, either move, rotate or scale, a manipulator appears which allows for intuive freeform or axis constrained editing. For objects or surfaces, this manipulator appears at their Pivot Points, but for Components, the manipulator appears at the center of the selecting vertices or hulls. This allows for editing in the Perspective window which was before only possible in orthographic views.


Figure Three

The default primitive sphere we placed over the image plane was created with eight vertical and four horizontal spans. Step one involves inserting enough horizontal isoparms to match the drawing, without including any areas of tight sudden changes in curvature. If the entire figure were, for example, six feet tall, you wouldn?t want to get any horizontal isoparms which are closer than one inch apart for the head and three inches for the torso. Using the Insert Isoparm tool and the Move tool, in the side view, place the hulls (rows of vertices) so that the Move manipulator is centered horizontally with the corresponding area of the drawing. Then switching to the Scale Manipulator, scaling the hull to match the design. An important note with the Scale Manip is to constrain the scaling to the Z direction. Not doing this will cause the selected vertices to also scale across the YZ plane, which will cause problems in mirror copying. Once the side view has been filled out, the same process is done in the front view. It is important for future ease of manipulation to try and keep the hulls as 'vertical' and 'horizontal' as possible; wavyness will make the wireframe very difficult to read and edit later. Figure 3 shows the various stages the model will go through while executing the these techniques.

With the basic forms filled in, it is now important to decide exactly how we want the curvature of the surface to flow. Trying to follow anatomical muscle flow can be difficult, but remember than many details can be added via bump and displacement maps later. The main problem is trying to get surfaces to deform diagonal to their parameterization. Thus at this point it is good to try to sculpt the still simple surface so that its isoparms, or surface curves, follow the flow of form in the design. For example, in the neck/shoulder area, muscles move from the back of the skull to end of the collar bone, and from behind the ear to the beginning of the collar bone. The Artisan module of Maya can make this process substantially quicker, especially later on when the geometry becomes more dense.