In this first volume of our Caveman series we cover the modeling of an organic character in Lightwave. The complete series will take you through the whole production pipeline of modeling, UV mapping, texturing, rigging, storyboarding and animation so it’s a great way of gaining some in-depth knowledge of all the different fields involved in character creation.
We start off in this tutorial with setting up some backdrops of our reference sketches and use a combination of tools and polygon geometry to rough out the basic shape of the head and the body. Here we work on getting good proportion on the model before we add more resolution and build up the detail that defines this character.
You'll learn how to sculpt out eyes, eyelids, nose, mouth and ears for human models and work in both polygon and subpatch mode on getting good edge flow in these areas to create geometry suitable for rigging and animation. We use a number of different edge tools to keep a clean edge flow and eliminate poles and non-quads that can cause problems in the deformation of the model.
When the head is finished we move on to the body and create some muscle definition and wrinkles for skin folds on this chubby character. We also make the hands and feet adding detail in these areas for proper finger and toenails. The head and body are then connected together and we define the detail in the areas of the neck and collarbone as well as clean up the mesh by removing loops we don’t need to get the complete character that will deform well when animated.
In the final parts of this tutorial we cover techniques for making clothes and use SasLite to create the hair on the head, face and body. We also do some more detail work on the mouth for the gums with teeth and finally we model the wooden club.
This series continues with UV mapping, texturing, rigging and animation, so if you're interested in continuing folowing this project the other tutorials can be found below;
