Maya Character

Download a turnaround animation!









A certain awesome Company at which I have recently applied, got back to me yesterday asking if I could work in Maya... Since my showreel only has Max and XSI, I decided to make a quick character head in Maya to show them I didn't mind what package I used for modeling. In this regard they're pretty much all the same. a poly's a poly... :)
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1- Modeling.

For this character, I started like I usually start an organic, edgeloop dependant, mesh. I created one face and started extruding an edge from the back of the neck to the front, following the contour of the sideview i drew... then, same thing around the contour of the jaw, eyes, mouth, nostrils, and so on for evry major edgeloop on the mesh. Once you're done with that, you can start joining up edgeloops together. That technique gave a quick, accurate and topological sound base mesh. It was fairly low-poly, and since the end model was going to be quite detailed, I smoothed that model once to give me more polys to work with. (sort of like in that "Hyper Real modeling" tutorial. Once that was done, I used artisan to adjust volumes and the general shape.

2-Unwrapping.

For the unwrapping, I used "Pelt.mel" to unwrapp. Cut seems around the back of the head, neck an shoulders.

3-Texturing was minimal but still present. I just painted a skin texture in Photoshop using the clone tool and some ref photos of people's faces. Then I played with the hue and saturation to get an unearthly looking tone...

4-Rendering

The rendering has two passes, a simple beauty, with 3 lights, and an occlusion pass.