No Comments Written by Robert on June 19, 2008 – 2:22 pm

Animation production is a phase that some of you are very familiar with and others are just learning. Either way, our goal in this chapter is to use all of our design material for 3D model creation and animation direction.

3D Modeling

3D modeling is where all of our designs will spring to life into a solid 3D world. It’s the most exciting part of animation because all of our design work on paper has led to this moment… the moment of truth. Remembering that 2D drawings can be cheated, truth is what you will find as you start modeling your objects because a 3D model will not allow for the loose placement of shape, proportion, or contour.

Each part of your 3D model needs to work together as if it were a real-life object, and for that we have created our three-view orthographic drawing. My first 3D model is going to be our main character, Bleep. I’m simply going to load my three-view orthographic drawing into my modeling program and get started. As you can see, I’ve only loaded his front and side views because I feel they give me enough information to start my 3D model. See image 1:

I zero in on his head and start modeling the front half of his face. I’m going to build only one side of his face and then mirror that side at a later time. For now I want to concentrate on proportion, contour, and shape. My goal is to build the overall silhouette of his head first, then I’ll add detail like eyes, mouth, eyebrows, and design detail later. This is a good start if you have the modeling experience to just dive right in; however, if you’re not quite ready to start modeling the final version and want to do a quick check on proportions, I have a good solution.

Use a Three-View Basic Shape Drawing as Reference

Sometimes it’s easier to construct your 3D model with simple shapes first before starting any kind of complex modeling (image 2).

Using my three-view basic shape drawing as reference, I’ve blocked out a 3D construction model of Bleep and matched it up against his three-view orthographic drawing. Fortunately I planned for this stage, knowing that in certain areas my simple shapes might show me something that doesn’t look right, such as odd proportions or misplaced shapes. In this case, I feel that Bleep’s head might look a little too large, so I’ll make a mental note of this and then make a change later.

I will model his head according to my three-view orthographic reference and then make any size and proportion adjustments later when Bleep’s model is more complete. This way I’m not getting caught up in details that can be worked out later; I’m just concentrating on accuracy at this point.

Model in Halves

To start my 3D model of Bleep, I’ll choose his head first. It’s the most complicated part of his design and I want to get the hardest things out of the way first. The challenge is to build a perfectly symmetrical 3D model; that is, both the left and right side being symmetrical. The easiest approach to this challenge is to build only half of your 3D model to start.

Building only half your model will give you the opportunity to focus on smoothing out contours, adjusting proportion, and delineating shape to its finest detail without doing double the work on the opposite half. In Bleep’s case, I’m going to model the left half of his head first and then mirror that object to create the right half. I will then join the two halves together by welding each corresponding point until I’ve created a complete head (image 3).