I did play around with Blender for a while now and am familiar with some of it’s tools and workflows but I never finished a model. That was manily because I tried to complex models like heads and characters. I want to change this now! That’s why I picked an animal I really like: The elephant!
I want to use this thread to get some feedback and inspiration. I am fairly new to modelling and need a lot of help, I guess. To end up with a fine polished model I believe you need to get things right from the start. By this I mean: Try to get the basic shapes right, before you paint the textures for the eyebrows.
At the moment I have a basic elephant model that I made in Blender using a reference image as background and using the Grease Pencil to sketch a 3D contour of my elephant (Thank you, Sebastian König for the “Fly” timelapse).
I hope you are willing to help me, make my way to a nice looking elephant! Maby you have some tips for me on how to proceed or polishing the model. Currently I’m using a mirror and a subsurf modifier. That’s why there’s this ugly cut in the middle of the model.
You beat me to the post, I’ve been working on an elephant of my own on and off for a few weeks now and was thinking about posting it on here soon for some feed back… oh, well, I guess I’m never all that original anyways. (but I’ll gladly swipe that side on reference photo… )
The thing that I can see will probably be giving you trouble right now (other then what Ricky said already) is it looks like you have to many faces on the legs, not that that will make it impossible, but I’ve found that the fewer faces you use the easier it is to get the overall shape correct, which is critical to having a nice polished looking model.
first of all let me say: Thank you! It is amazing that I received so many comments on my elephant even after one day. I took all of them very seriously and tweaked my model a bit:
Added a tail with prototype hair
Added eyes
The tusks are a little bit bigger and cut off at the end
I also tweaked the control mesh a little bit
[LIST]
@RickyBlender: I added another loop on the side of the model. Nails on the paws come next. I hope, I’ll be faster sometime.
[/LIST] @Atemporalskill: The wire in the previous shots was that of the subsurfed mesh. The screenshots attached to this post show the actual control mesh which is in my opinion ok. But take a look at it yourself and tell me what you think, please.
@Minifig: The tail is now present and can be viewed in some of the screenshots attached to this post.
@Gally: Thank you, I like the head best, too. Except for the ears. They are ugly in my opinion.
Update:
I have to say, that modelling with Mirror and Subsurf modifiers is cool, but if you want to use the sculpt tool to push some vertices around in a little more elegant fashion, the clipping option of the mirror modifier is ignored. That’s probably why I have this funny proboscis mesh (front view).
Thank you for your critics! I’ll keep you updated.
This is not a camera trick. In the header of the 3D View, click on the rightmost button titled “Render this view”, that’s all.
Nice, now that are big tusks! It looks like you modeled the tusks by hand, take a look at the picture I added. You can use splines to get a perfect decrease of radius of the tusks. Simply create a spline defining the basic form of the tusks, then create another spline to define the outline shape. At last use a spline to control the thickness (decrease of radius) for your tusks. In my model file, the splines are located on layer 2.
I’m looking forward to view your model
I am currently cleaning up my head mesh. The eyes and tusk holes produced to many triangles that are not needed and can be replaced with quads. Are the results (see screenshots) ok so far?
i mean the camera with the little cross where od you get that?
i usually used an empty with a camera lock
it’s eaier to locate and focus where i want!
i the ifle i preparing i included an eye with an iris inside
you can use it when i upload it later tomorrow or this night if i can solve the problen of the color
and i did my tusk with 2 bezIer or nurbs curves
but you still have to place it in 3D to get the model you want
see pic
mind you i reduced the ear’s size becaue mammoth did not have ears that big
because living in cold region it was not needed to cool off the animal i guess
Hay nice work on this, yeah, even now that I’ve seen your base mesh I still kinda think you could get rid of one or two of those edge loops on the legs, but that might be more of a personal preference. One thing that is for sure is that the legs still look a too square. (I call that the “wet noodle” look when I run into the same problem.)
As for the topology on the head, I can’t help you out too much there because the elephant that I’ve been doing it actually a hybrid between an elephant and one of my friends faces, (who happens to love elephants.) which means I followed a topology set up that is more like a humans face.
I know what you mean with the ears, they are ridiculously big and awkward to model, I’ve restarted from scratch on mine about 3 or 4 times now. yours don’t look that bad though, maybe an another loop or two to help define its shape more.