Research & Development for 3D & the Web

This first section is related to the basics of modelling a 3D character in Maya which is game-ready. Game ready models sacrifice detail (polygons) with the aim of improving the frame rate of your game as your machine does not need to process those extra polygons (in a simplified way of saying it at least).

See here for a comprehensive walk through.. or my notes below are a quick-guide. Please note all images from this post come from the tutorial linked here. See the bottom of the page for images of most of the steps.

To start with, draw up a front view, side view and back view of the outline of the character and set them up as image planes in your Maya scene as discussed in the Image Plane post.

You want to start off with a very low resolution model and you can progressively increase this as you work. Use Cylinders to block out half of the character (this will be mirrored later on so that the character is symmetrical).

Start by creating three cylinders. Set the height to 8, subdivision axis to 8 and the subdivision height to 10, (this can differ depending on the poly count restrictions on the character, although it is easier to remove polygons later than to try and add them.)

Use the Front and Side views in Maya to shape the vertices of the cylinders to the shape of the image on the image plane.

One workable order for the cylinder shaping method is:

1. Leg
2. Arm
3. torso

Join them up taking careful notice of the groin to hip line on the leg and the arm to shoulder line on the arm. Split polygons to get the shape you want and merge verticies once you have cut a hole out of one cylinder to join the 2nd on into. (see images below as a reference).

The neck is a slightly smaller cylinder, but you don’t halve this one since we won’t be mirroring it in the end, just joining it to the head and then the neck to the body after mirroring the body.

4. Neck

5. Head

The rest is pretty self explanatory.