So I’ve been doing 3D animation, for production, for about three years now. I get to touch on every aspect of creating short animations and visualizations. Most of the stuff I do is geared toward broadcast style production and short animations. So in this pipeline the models that I get to create are usually made with a somewhat high polygon count and are usually smoothed out before final render. This is all well and good. But I have a lot of interest in expanding my skill set to cover everything from 2d concept art, to low polygon game art. So I decided not so long ago that I would model my first low polygon character. The idea sounded easy to me at first but when I sat down to model my hero character I found that it wasn’t as easy as I thought.

Weird right? I mean I’m used to modeling characters with high polygon counts with meticulous attention to keeping all my faces quads. Low poly modeling should be pretty straightforward. But nooooo! It’s difficult because it’s so alien to me. I’m so used to modeling and keeping everything in quad form that the idea of throwing in and using triangles feels so wrong. Its crazy, its like my brain can’t get around the idea of using a three-sided face to model a shape. So frustration breeds research, at least in this case.

One of the many artists that I like to keep my eye on is Ben Mathis. This guy is a great game art creator, and it shows in his models. He also is all about sharing his techniques and teaching the workflows for creating great game models. Check his site out its good stuff. So I downloaded and followed some of his video tutorials and started to see how this workflow goes. I guess it was just hard for me at first to get past that mental block of keeping all my faces quads. I even wrote Ben and asked him if he had any special rule that he uses to place triangles. Turns out, like always, that it’s all about practice and common sense. He said to keep in mind that the model will not be smoothed and that its all about shape and finding that shape, whether you use a quad or a triangle. Makes sense right? You know how if you sit down to draw you are usually pretty tight and rigid at first? You need time to loosen up and get used to the feeling of the pencil in your hand and you need to let your arm muscles relax before you can really get into laying down some good lines. I guess I have to say that low poly modeling is the same way for me. I followed Ben’s tutorials very closely and realized that I was being too rigid with my models. So I spent a few hours just free modeling. Just letting myself throw down faces, and edges to find that right shape, and then went back to clean up my work later on. I have to say that it’s working out. At first I didn’t think I would be able to make a decent game model, but I think I’ll be able to get through it after all. I do have to thank Ben for his input and great tutorials that really got me interested and started in this endeavor. And I’m sure when I start to texture the character I will be back writing about how different that is. But that’s for another entry.

Filed under Character, General.