i have been thinking now for a while on this and i need some help
i have herd the term “box modeling” befor and im guessing thats refering to pulling somthing from a box (if im wrong please let me konw)
i have also herd this is not a very good practice expecialy with human like models
i was wondering if there are any tutorials on modeling from scratch
like for example i have seen the face tutorial where they use the pucture for a referiance but im not relly sure on how to go about that
if anyone can help ide appriacate that it could help me when i head off to an animation school
Box modeling basically means you start with a solid shape like a cube and you subdivide and extrude until you wind up with the shape you want. This differs somewhat from extrusion modeling, where you start with vertices or edges or planes and you basically extrude and merge and create faces to create your model.
In the end, I don’t think there’s any real cut and dry distinction. Both approaches use mostly the same tools (extrusion, subdividing, merging, ripping, etc) and so there’s a lot of overlap. As to which is better for what, I think it’s mostly personal preference.
You can see great head, body, hands, etc, modeling tutorials using the mostly box style modeling approach here:
I don’t know any extrusion modeling tutorials for bodies, but if you search this forum for mr_bomb’s “adrianna” video tutorial, you’ll find a good face tutorial that uses a mostly extrusion modeling approach. Compare that to the face in the tutorial above and you’ll get the picture.
wings3d is a better tool for box modeling as it has ngons .ngons are really useful for box modeling, as one is always adjusting the topology, and doing this in blender is difficult.
having said that, i think box modeling can be over rated. i prefer to sketch out a couple of poly lines and then do poly by poly or edge extrude, as it’s much faster, as long as you have a solid understanding of where the edgeloops should go.
i have a couple of excellent time lapse videos of someone modeling using edge extrude and poly by poly. i refer to them often. if you want i could post them somewhere for download (they are too big to email). i have found them invaluable. i’d have to use a service like yousendit.com. they were originally posted on CGTalk.
the second reality tutorials that bugman linked to are excellent, and i learned a lot from the head modeling tutorial when i was a heavy wings user, but that particular head tutorial doesn’t lend itself well to blender’s modeling paradigm. however, the tutorials for the body and limbs can be done easily in blender.
i actualy seen that video that was mentioned the adrianan video and i was like wow im goin to learn from that i finaly get how they use a picture for reference have a side and a front at the same time i dont konw why but that just didnt click untill now ive got some ideas now
a good service to upload videos to i have found is youtube or google video
youtube is free and fast
google video you have to have a gmail account and it takes like 1 day for the video to go live
It doesn’t matter what technique you use you just have to be good at it and you can make it look like any technique made it it is all in skill not in the technique but boxmodeling (sub-surface modeling) is useful for more cartoon charactors where things don’t have to be exact do you remember the old man playing chess a short in one of the pixar movies the man was made using sub-surface (box modeling)