This week we practised 3D animation with a bouncing ball. Below is a screenshot of the animation I made following a lecturer’s tutorial.
I enjoyed modelling the pufferfish because I got to see all my personal development in 3d modelling thus far.
I first blocked out the character using basic shapes. A large sphere for the body two spheres for the eyes and 3 spares for the tail and flippers. I followed this tutorial on making a stylised heart in Maya to make the tail.
I then smoothed the shape with the smooth preview to polygons tool. I duplicated the tail shape to use as flippers.
This tutorial was particularly helpful in my modelling process as the pufferfish is essentially just a head with a tail and flippers. The heart shapes in her design emphasise her desirability.
As a group, we are aiming for a rubber hose style stylised look. I found the eyes to be very tricky to fit within the sockets I had already made. Both the eyes and sockets were resized multiple times to fit together cohesively. I’m still not entirely happy with how the lids on both eyes almost touch eachother awkwardly instead of fully merging like in the 2d design.
I used the symmetry tool to model as quickly as possible but I had ignored how the topology around the face was affecting the back of the model. The pufferfish at one stage had a very boxy shape forcing me to round the back by hand later on. Any inconsistent lumps in the mesh I fixed using edit edge flow.
