I have started making a gorilla. I want to use it for animation in the end. Here is what I have so far. This took about 2 hours. 
This is the picture I traced a simple outline from 
And this is the pic I just kept nearby for reference 
Please tell me what you think so far. I will try and update it regurarly.
I think it’s a darn good start. 
The projection on the top of the head may give you a bit of trouble later on, you may want to even out the geometry so that the head has a little more uniform smoothness to it. The neck seam might be a little thick, depending on how you’ll texture the model later.
Couple of questions: Are you using a mesh, or curves? And, do you think you’l use particle based fur or a texture or something else?
Thanks Captain Jack. I am using a mesh not curves and I hope to use particle fur for it. I saw this king kong fur in Brian’s fur library which looks like it would do pretty good.
You should refine the mesh, the legs don’t look fused into the body and I see a lot of wierd ridges and bumps.
It’s an okay start, just make sure you clean it up.
Cool, that’s a very good organic look for a mesh. You may need a lot of computer “oomph” or patience (or both! ;)) if you’re going to do an animation with a particle fur covered critter. In that case, another modeling idea might be to thin the arms a little bit; some of the volume of the animal comes from the fur being at a distance from the body, and he may end up looking a little puffy once you get the fur on.
One thing to consider, too, might be using a combination of a visible fur texture on the mesh with sparser particle fur emitted from it. You may get a look that’s every bit as good without having as much rendering overhead.
Looking forward to seeing your animation work. 
Hmmm, I’m afraid I’m not going to be quite as positive as the Captain. I don’t see this turning out well if you don’t make some important changes soon.
The nose just doesn’t look like a gorilla nose, the top of the head looks wrong too. Together they look like a vertical cylinder with a horizontal cylinder sticking out of it. You’re being guided too much by the side view I think.
Look at your reference pics. The snout is more like a squashed sphere than a cylinder. There is a huge brow sticking out over the eyes. The skull from eye to eye is virtually flat and facing forward, not cylindrical. The nostrils slope back quite close to the eyes - below the brow ridge. There is no pointy ridge on top of the head.
You probably need to find a front view of a head for a better reference and if you haven’t done so already, do the “better face tutorial” for the basics of making heads and facial features the “correct” way. Also search here for the lizard tutorial. It’s very basic but includes some VERY important tips and shows how it’s possible to get good results from a really simple mesh - look for Torq’s contribution to that thread.
As Icoxo/Dragon boy said, the arms look completely detached from the body. This is an “unusual” approach.
If you truly plan to animate it then the mesh topology will be important. Obviously it’s hard to guess the make-up from a solid render but it looks like the loops, especially on the head, don’t flow where the’ll need to. When you’re modelling, especially for animation, it’s useful if you post a wireframe screenshot too.
Don’t mean to dampen your enthusiasm but you’ll find it much easier if you get the basics right then build the detail. If you continue down this path I fear you’ll struggle as you go further.
That’s okay, we can’t all be rays of sunshine. (ducking…) 
Seriously, though, listen up when AndyD talks; he’s da man when it comes to modeling and animation.
Thanks AndyD, I hadn’t actually started doing the head much so that is why it looked wierd. I have now tweaked the head a bit I think it looks a lot better now. Here it is with its new head 
I think I should now try and join the legs onto the body mesh because as AndyD said the legs probaly won’t work when animating. Do you think the new and improved head is better?
You could try deleting the faces that face the body and deleting the faces that face the arms and then use F-key to connect the legs to the body one face at a time.
Or connect them one face at a time then delete all the interior faces.
Ok, I have joined the legs onto the mesh. I did it by deleting the faces on the arms and the body and manually creating faces to join them together. Quite pleased with the result. O yer and I added some legs on the back aswell. Here it is 
This little project seems to be coming along well. Which is a change!
That head is very off. The Arm has too many bumps in it. The sholder needs to be higher and more towards the front. The Bumps probably are attributed to the traycing of the fur. Try not to do that.
If you have a bit of spare time, take a look at this tutorial from EnV. It’s not a gorilla but it shows some basic concepts - like how to extrude limbs from the body. It’s for the old Blender but little has changed as far as this tutorial is concerned.
I still feel your underlying structure will make this difficult. Keep at it by all means because you learn a lot by just doing stuff - and you can’t be an expert from the start.
Seriously, though, listen up when AndyD talks; he’s da man when it comes to modeling and animation.
Thanks but rest assured that’s far from true. I struggle with both. I “understand” many of the principles but rest assured I still have to go back to old tutorials to work out how to get things done. There are many around here who far, far, far surpass anything I can do.
Hello, Thanks for that AndyD. I have been going round and trying to fix all the litlle mesh deformations. I have fixed quite a few. I have also started on the face of the gorilla. Will it be necessary to have a perfect mesh because I am going to use thick particle fur on top of it. Here is the latest 
I still need to sort out the shoulder areas and the lower back. Tell me what you think soo far!
I see it!
Couple of things (from a Blenda noob)
Work on as few polys as possible. I think you may have too many, its confusing and wastes time, dont be afraid to merge vertices to get rid of polys.
Use the mirror mod AndyD mentions in the next post (Was “Halve your model…” [deleted])
You will have to do half the work, and now you can apply subdivision on the duplicated half so you can see what the final smoothed result looks like (see models on last page of my wip for example).
Anatomy crit: shoulders are bit too much in front (too close to the chin), and too close to the centerline of the body.
Okay, it’s starting to come together now. I’d still like to see a wireframe. The mesh is always important if you plan to animate because it determines how things will distort. Even fur has to follow rules and if the underling mesh is wrong, the fur won’t behave (I’ve never used fur but I’m pretty certain topology is still very important). On areas like the nose and mouth, loops are very important for animation - and good loops make things easier to adjust as you model.
- Halve your model (yes cut away the left or right side), make a linked duplicate of the remaining half, mirror it and position the mirrored half so that the mesh looks whole again. Now any changes you make to the original will show on the linked dupli.
Actually, we don’t make linked duplicates any more, we used a Mirror Modifier now. Much easier, far more flexible and it deals with normals and centre line much better. Just select your half mesh, go to modifiers palette and choose Mirror. When you’re finished modelling, choose “make real” (or is it “apply”?) and it will join the two halves.
Thanks for sharing Andy! Much wiser now, and another few seconds saved every time I model…
Here is a wire of the model so far. This might give you more information about the model AndyD. 
Here are some better wires. I only just learnt how to render solid wireframes. Here is the mesh 
and here is a close up of the face 
just out of cusiosity - what method did you use to render the solid wireframes?
Once again, the sholders are too low and need to be much bigger. Oh, I hope your not planning on animating it, because that face will deform incorrectly.
