A friend asked me to sketch his RPG (role-playing-game) character for him, and when I offered to make it CG, he gladly accepted. Here it is. The creature depicted was described to me with words such as “fire-using, chiseled from stone, ember-eyed, wielding a hammer too large for him.” I had a 2-week deadline, which might sound like a lot, but I can only work on this stuff after the kids are in bed (hmm, maybe I should get them to do my texturing…).
To create the character, I created a base mesh using Makehuman (get it if you don’t have it - fantastic little app for creating humanoid characters!), then extensively used scupt mode to refine the mesh in multires. I added an armature, but posed only the upper body, and I didn’t attempt to make any facial expressions. To save time, the character is procedurally textured, although the hammer is UV-mapped. Also to save time, I decided to omit clothing (:o ). Not perfect, certainly, but I feel like I’m making progress. C&C welcome: This image is done, but the character might live on in some sort of short.
looks good. That hammer doesn’t really look to large for him. I would also make the facial expression more on the angry side.
Thanks, Imperitor. Yeah, the hammer does look a bit small, in perspective. I’m thinking I’ll scale it up, if I continue the guy. And I’ll definitely do some shape-key facial things too.
(BTW, forgot to mention: the render is Blender internal w/ AO; yafray doesn’t do particle halo, tho I did try a render w/ composite nodes to combine a yafray render w/ a Blender halo - looked ok, but not worth the trouble…)
Most of this looks good but one thing does leap out at me as being less realistic. The hand gripping the hammer shaft just doesn’t look like it is really holding on to something heavy. Take a baseball or cricket bat and hold it in one hand out straight ahead of you and look at your hand (or even better, get someone to take a picture for reference). The fingers should curl firmly around the shaft and the thumb should lock across to the first or second finger.
You’re quite right, and it’s something that bugs me as well. I think I’m going to have to scale up the hammer head, and thin down the grip. In looking, as you suggest, at a hand gripping a heavy object, I see two things happen: 1, the tendons bulge at the wrist and 2, the fingers “squash” around the haft. Lattice modifier maybe? If I seriously rig him, I’ll work on that.