After deciding which of my concepts I went into Maya and set up my scene my importing my front and side profile images of my concept to model my staff from!
Modeling:
When modeling the very first thing I wanted to model was the handle and the two main pieces leading up to the eye, to do this I simply made a cylinder and change it’s subdivisions to 24 in case I need to make a bevel at the top and bottom planes later on. Using the references as a guide I scaled the object to the width of the handle and then selected the vertices at the top in order to stretch it to my desired length, after which I made some edge loops around the cylinder at the points where the model would stretch out. At that point I selected the edges of my edge loops and used the scale tool in order to get them to match scale of my reference, getting a rough low-poly version of my staff handle. I continued to make edge loops and pulling them out in order to help smooth out my edges and match up further with the reference.
Next up was the ball floating above top of the round platform it was hovering over. To make the platform for the floating ball I got a sphere and scaled it up to my desired size and flattened it a small amount to fit the reference, after which I grabbed the faces at the top and pulled them down into the ball, deselecting the faces furthest from the tip of the ball and pulling them down further, I continued this until I was able to make a round divot in the ball. As for the floating ball at the top I simply made a cube and smoothed it down twice from the mesh display tools since I knew I didn’t need make any changes to mesh of the ball later on I wanted to keep it as low-poly as I could.
The rings were up next, to do this I simply made a cylinder and made a bevel at the center point at both the top and bottom sides of the cylinder, then after stretching out the large faces I deleted them, leaving me with a thin edge at both the top and bottom side of the cylinder, after that was done all that was left to do was to select the new edges I made and bridge them together, then at that point I had made myself a new loop, at the time I didn’t realize there was a pipe polygon available so I had to do it my own way. After this I began working on the bottom side of the staff, using two torus polygons I tried to follow the references I had for my staff, however following them was a bit too difficult for me at my level of skill so I decided to improvise, making up a different design using the torus polygons I had, as for the spike, I just used simple cone polygon and scaled its length up a bit. Next on my list of things to create was the mid part in between the round platform and the base pole, making this part was fairly simple, I just grabbed the edges at the front and pulled them down to a point, after which I grabbed the edges at the side and pulled them up to a point!
Following this I decided next would be a good time to try and re-create the floating parts around the top side of the model, I started off with the easy part which was the round parts around the pole of the model to create them I made a sphere, changing its subdivisions to 16 high and 16 across, after which I cut the sphere in two. I then took the object up and aligned it with my reference at which point I grabbed its vertices and pulled them out to again match with my reference, since there wasn’t any thickness to my object either I used the bevel tool and scaled it down to give it two faces, after this I simply duplicated my model and flipped it around to the other side. Next was the parts floating around the orb initially I was confused on how I’d make these, however after some research I discovered the “create polygon tool” which made my life a lot easier since all I had to do was follow the points around my reference in order to get the shape that I wanted and once I was done with that I used the extrude tool to give some dimension to the new flat planes I created.
Finally the last thing I had to model was the eye, to do this I looked up how to create an eye online and using my knowledge from there I made my own, to do this I made a sphere and cut it in half after which I grabbed the faces of the model near the front and pulled them out until it created a small bulge, recreating the Cornea of the eye, once I was finished that I moved it into place, however after doing so it look right, so I decided to put a ring around the eye using the torus polygon to help prevent it looking like it was just two objects thrown together.
After finishing the main modeling part I decided to go back and look at the silhouette of the model I felt like it was a bit plain looking, and so I decided to go back and make some adjustments to the mid part of the staff, adding some ridges and extruding some faces in to help make the model look a bit more exciting and I’m happy to say that the before and after really did make a nice change overall to the model. Not only that but I decided to also add a torus to the part connecting the staff pole and mid-section, in addition to that I also went ahead and added another one of the rings I made earlier to the bottom of my staff to help make the silhouette more interesting.
Referenced Videos:
Polygon tool video:
Eyeball tutorial video: