Less-than final touches

I have put the finishing touches on my chrome Box-stick man, originally I was going to start off with a box and “Box Model” a simple character, by pulling (Manipulating) vertices and polygons to make the muscular shape of the character in the way I wanted, then I briefly tried to use a more memory taxing way of making a character in Sculptris, which I have had a lot of experience with.

I then went back to making a simple character but for the sake of time only made a simple man, I am still unsure if I should refer to it as a box man or a stickman.

Throughout this project I learned how to navigate Blender on a Mac 1-button mouse, as well as learning hotkeys on Mac and Windows alike, this helped me a lot in my other Blender projects in terms of workflow. I also learned the how to fully customize the UI, at one point my screen looked like this because I couldn’t figure out how to collapse some aspects of the UI. An optimistic person might see this screenshot and think “Wow! He must be organized and productive” due to my having so many useful UI options open simultaneously, however this was not the case and eventually I reached a point where I would attempt to close a feature but instead open multiple, this has however been taken care of and as usual I feel foolish for not knowing how to do something that is somewhat basic.

I also learned something completely new in a 3d software, Rigging, I had always known that to make an animation in a 3d software, the animator had to assign bones to certain parts of the mesh, but I had never tried doing it myself for fear that it would get too complicated, however in this assignment, because I made a simple bipedal stickperson; I was able to add simple “Armature” to the model. Armature seems to me like simpler bones, with less defined joints and ball and socket features which make other models more detailed in their movement, however it is much easier to work with than bones in Blender I am told.

It seems like my original plan for what I wanted to do within blender has now become quite skewed from reality, I ended up trying to unwrap the model of my stickman, so I could add eyes and a basic texture to it, but I ended up failing horribly. This wasn’t all bad however because I was able to take a shot at adding armature to the model, the feature for which I kept seeing in the corner of my screen when I worked on it.

In the end I have made an amorphous man model, with a chrome finish that has rudimentary movement, I could then use this model to make a short animation or refine it further to give it more character. But more realistically I will try my hand at box modeling some sort of rudimentary quadruped with a real texture.

This project has let me learn the basic skills I need to start really getting into a complex software.