When designing my character I had in mind how I might go about modelling it; a sweep mesh tapered at one end and extruded towards the top for the main body (below),
Elongated spheres for the eyes and the moustache, and by way of the hat a plane with a bend deformer applied for the brim and a manipulated cube for the crown.
It became clear, however, after too long trying this method of hat-making that it wasn’t quite working. I found some advice online about making hats in maya and found a very handy method of narrowing a cylinder at the top, deleting the faces of the bottom and extruding the bottom edges to create the brim. From here I was able to manipulate the verts making use of soft select to get something quite close to the steep and intentionally menacing shapes in my design
This method proved correct. One downside I found though is that such a tall brim leaves the sides of my character looking very long from the sides, but my character will largely be shot from the front so it shouldn’t be too much of an issue.
I struggled, too, with my character’s belts. Initially I attempted to wrap rows of small cylinders around the body of my model which was incredibly tedious and near impossible to get how I wanted it, but after some brainstorming I thought I could try using a pipe. So I gave a pipe more subdivisions with the multi-cut tool and extruded every other loop to create the impression of casings or storage compartments and it seemed to work well. I used soft select in vertex mode to have the belts conform to the body and I was pleased
I chose some appropriate colours just so there was some contrast in the design and between the different elements in the model, and to get a rough idea of how I’d like the final character to look once it was textured etc.
On seeing my character model, Mike reminded me about smoothing my mesh and after voicing concerns about losing the specific shapes of elements like his hat he showed me that I could bevel the pointed edges to make sure the smoothing was less drastic when smoothed, which worked well for both the hat and the belts.