3d art

Character
An aggressive pose
Posing the warrior
15 Joint setup
Bringing the warrior into
Maya, I place the geo into its
own layer and set it to
Template. Next I quickly add
the spine joint in the
Orthographic side view up
to the neck and head. I make
joints for the legs and join
them to the hip. In the
Orthographic top view I
create arms and join them at
the shoulder scapula. The
position of the joints should
be close to the centre of the
mass they’re located in o.
o
16 Skinning
I use Bind skin with Max influences set to 1 so I can easily
find any vertexes that don’t belong and fix appropriately.
Next I use the Paint Skin Weights tools to quickly blend
between joints, and adjust the weights slightly, testing the
deformation by bending the joints p.
p
q
Top tip
Frank Frazetta’s paintings have lots of action and colour.
Action shots require a dynamic pose, and I find that when
deforming or posing geometry in modo, it’s helpful to use
Morph maps to retain the original shape for additional
editing or to try other poses. For a painterly look, all the
textures use saturated colour rather then blacks and whites
for tone and hue. For the skin, I used a saturated copy of the
main Diffuse texture applied to Subsurface Color in the
shader to bring out the skin’s tans, blues, greens and reds.
17 Posing
With the base object imported in for reference, I start to
pose the model, carefully checking from all angles, but
mostly from the composition’s low camera angle. With the
pose complete, I detach the skin, and make sure Bake
History is active, then export both the posed and unposed
mesh of the warrior as OBJ files q.
18 Morph setup
The unposed warrior mesh
and the posed one are reimported
into modo. I place
the posed version in a
background layer and create
a Morph map for the
unposed mesh and use
Vertex Map/Transfer to
apply the deformation of the
background mesh onto the
morph of the active mesh.
When posing, ensure the
Morph map is active R.
r
o I make sure the arm and leg
joints have a bend going into
positive Z, then add IK
p Using the Paint Skin
Weights tool to fix blending
q Shifting the weight of the
model to make it a bit
more dramatic
r The vertex deform data is
transferred to the active
Morph map
s Using the Flex and Sculpt
tools, I adjust the final pose
and deformations
s
19 Tweaking
The posing in Maya was
rough and joint bends could
look better. With the Morph
map active, I adjust the
deformation at joints and
hips. I will also slightly ‘bulge
out’ muscle, position the
weapons and add a bit of
variation to the costume
feathers for a ruffled look s.
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