Week 4

Ice Skater Character Start

Having decided to model and animate a female Ice Skater from previous research into human body language, the initial modelling process  can now get underway. The creation of 3D assets will following a logical order starting at the base of the character i.e. producing the the Ice Skates and will then progress upwards with the legs, body then finally the head.

 

Ice Skates

The boot section of a typical Ice Skate was created first using a box primitive which was converted to an “editable poly” then transformed using the move and scale tools to match a generic reference image as closely as possible. A hole was then cut out by deleting a group of polygons on the top surface to make room for the leg opening and provide a space for the tongue of the boot.

 

Basic Boot Shape Creation

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A clone of the deleted polygons was then manipulated to form the tongue section of the boot and was extruded to give to some depth. This was then positioned in the centre of the boot and curved inwards slightly using the “Bend” modifier to roughly simulate the raised contours as depicted by the reference image plane. The sole of the boot was formed by extruding and scaling  the bottom section of polygons to initially produce a rim then heel at the rear of the boot. The shape of the heel was also angled using the vertice sub-object level to correspond again with the reference image. The two boot objects were then grouped and given a “Mesh Smooth” modifier to round of any harsh angled edges and portray a soft flowing leather like appearance.

 

Tongue, Sole & Heel Creation

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The next stage was to produce the shoe laces, which began by creating a series of cylinders to approximately mark out the eye-lit hole positions for the laces to pass through. 2D Spline objects were then drawn between diagonally adjacent lace holes to replicate the criss-cross pattern of real laces. These Spline objects were then given an arched shape by inserting extra vertices to follow the shape of the tongue and boot surfaces.

 

Spline Laces & Eye-lit Positioning

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The Splines were then given “Extrude” modifiers and converted to editable ploys to produce a flat 3D appearance, the eye-lits were then fashioned using basic donut primitives and positioned at the end of each lace. Metal lace clips were constructed for the upright eye-lit positions which in real-life would help pull the boot around the wearers foot. These again were produced using simple box objects and were  then converted to editable polys. They were also shaped using the vertice sub-object mode to create a rounded appearance with multiple angled faces to accurately represent  overhanging clips.

 

Extruded Laces & Detail Creation

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The last portion of the Ice Skates to produce were the blades attached to the sole of each boot. These were created again using box modelling, gradually moving selected groups of vertices to correspond with the reference image. The top sections of the blades were bevelled outwards several times to form the plates which connect to the sole of each boot, the bottom of the blades on the other hand were given a sharp angled look by scaling down selected edges.

 

Box Modelled Blades

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Once the Ice Skates had been fully modelled there were then  textured using an array of different materials to simulate typical aspects such as wooden soles, stainless steel blades and leather boots. First the leather material was created using a combination of noise and bump maps to simulate the mottled wrinkles similar to that of real leather. The leather material was then assigned a creamy-white diffuse colour and given a small amount of “Specular Highlights” to produce a natural soft shiny finish. The wood sole material was made by combining  wood and noise maps into the bump slot of the material, the diffuse colour was then set to a rich brown and a varnished appearance was achieved by assigning a higher amount of “Glossiness” compared to the leather material. The blades were purposely given a chrome-like material to represent stainless steel using a fake reflection map with a “Raytrace” material type. This same material was copied and adjusted for the gold eye-lits and lace clips by simply adjusting the Diffuse Colour and reducing the amount of reflection. The final textured Ice Skates can been seen below:

 

Final Rendered & Textured Ice Skates

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