Iguanaman

Hey all, long time no see; I used to be really active here back in like 2012(I was in 8th/9th grade), and I decided to start another model since I had some time this summer. My friend and I are thinking of messing around with Unreal, and I got the idea for an iguana man character. Here’s the model so far.

I never really modeled any humans, and I’m wondering: does anybody have any good resources for modeling a human torso? Like a video tutorial or something.

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It’s nice to hear that you and your friend plan to work on a project together. I hope your plans turn out well!

Your model’s head is looking pretty good so I will just comment about the anatomy. I don’t know your workflow so sorry if I assume wrong, but I think you should use the Properties Panel to assign full body reference pictures of your character to different views before getting any farther. If you make a turnaround of your character, you can plan the character before spending time/making mistakes in 3D.

I don’t know if you are imagining this character with realistic proportions or stylized, unrealistic proportions. Either way, anatomy books for 2D artists are good references to look at while you model even if you know how to draw humans. I recommend looking up “Save Loomis! - Alex Hayes” on Google. They have some drawing books by Andrew Loomis as PDFs. The books have only recently been recirculated in print so now you can actually buy them if you like (I recommend “Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth” and “Drawing the Head & Hands”).

Even though you will be using blender to make your iguana character, I think ZBrush has more professional resources for anatomy than blender does. If you Google search “ZBrush model torso” you will see a more consistent quality compared to if you searched “blender model torso”.

I attached a quick mark up of your character. Not sure if it’s helpful at all and sorry it’s a bit wonky–it was hard to work from the perspective.

Thanks uncreepy; yes, I scrapped the torso in the above pic, and I got some human references and remodeled in accordance with those references. I thought I could eyeball it, but I’ve just been away from modeling for too long. I decided to make the neck quite elongated and whatnot, but I think I captured the human proportions by more or less tracing the reference.

Ignoring the muscle definition and finer details(will fix them later), are the proportions better now?

Wow, you got a lot done quickly. I think everything is looking good so far, especially once you get to the muscles.

The only thing my sister and I agreed on is that you could try making the lower legs a little longer. It seems like the bottom of the knees is somewhere between 5-6 heads high and the feet bottoms are 6-7 heads high. That is actually accurate for a real human, but it could end up looking a little better at 8 heads high. 8 heads is an “ideal” way to draw people and it could help balance the long neck with longer legs.
The torso proportions are very good now so all you would have to do is to make the bottom of the knees at 6 heads and the bottom of the feet at 8.

I’m looking forward to seeing how your character turns out, especially when you get to the texturing stage.

Hm… Perhaps, I’ll give it a shot. I made the legs a little shorter than the reference, because certain species of iguana have shorter hind legs than front legs. I feel like it looks a little less human that way.

So I sculpted it:


Any critiques on the sculpt? I probably won’t change them for this model, since I already went in and added scales(which slowed my computer down to a crawl), but I’ll keep them in mind for the future.

I baked down the normal map, and created a diffuse map using a stencil method.

Any crits? I haven’t touched shaders at all, but I feel like better materials + a specmap would go a long way to making this look better. And there’s some UV stretching, but that’s just from an error in my workflow that I’ll fix on future models.