After a couple weeks of working non-stop on Aqua’s body model, it’s finally complete! The next step will be trying to figure how to approach her clothes and her hair. However, even though her body model is done, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t things I would like to fix on it. There are many areas that kind of bother me, and I wanted to go over them briefly as I may change them later. This will kind of be like my post about Aqua’s head.
The biggest struggle with female characters is getting the right form. I had mentioned this when I was writing about why I chose her as my project, and a bit in the post about the head model, but I also want to mention it here. The female form is softer than and often not as angular as the male form. Though in theory this would make it easier, it actually makes things harder. This is because even veering off of these soft shapes a bit will make the character not look feminine and if your character is feminine in features, this causes problems. Everything had to have that soft flow for a character to look feminine. It often takes multiple passes to get it just right, but it’s totally worth the learning experience!
First and foremost I think that the body proportions are okay, but they may have to be adjusted when rigged. The one reason why anime looking characters are sometimes hard to translate directly into 3D is that they have longer legs. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it will take some test weights and pose tests to figure out if her long legs will hinder her at all when she’s in motion. Character definitely do not need to be anatomically the same as an actual human being, but it may take some adjustment in other parts of her body to keep that anime feel, but also give her a wide range of motion. There’s also this kind of back and forth between modeling and rigging, which makes it kind of fun if you do both. You get to see how your decisions in one of the other can affect decisions down the line. It’s always good to keep this in mind because, if you’re working on a team, you want to be clear about what you’re doing and what your co-workers are doing.
Second are Aqua’s hands. As much as I’ve struggled with modeling heads, I also struggle with hands, though hands have more of a measure to them then heads do. The struggle with hands is that I often want to model from reference, and the best reference I have is my own hands. There’s a problem a though. My fingers are a shorter, but when looking at Aqua’s hands in the concept art, they are thin and delicate. So I instead pull from online reference of hands that kind of match hers. The only problem is, with thinner fingers, though they have a delicate look to them, not giving them the right form makes them look skeletal and unappealing. I have to mitigate with that and made them a bit thicker, though I do want to go back and take another pass at them, maybe try to get that delicate form in there. We will also have to see how delicate fingers will perform in the rig because thin fingers tend to have a hard time forming a fist, but that’s for later discussion.
The last thing I’ll touch on is her feet. I have never modeled feet… ever. My first character wore a long dress so I got away with just modeling “paddle feet” which are exactly what they sound like… they look like a paddle. For my Alice in Wonderland model, I didn’t have to model feet because she wore shoes. This was the first time I had to really study feet in order to model something. And let me tell you it was hard. Feet have a very particular shape to them and require a lot of preplanning. I kind of just went for it with her feet, but I would definitely like to do another pass at them, maybe with some better reference of more feminine feet. Something looks off and they don’t have the noticeable plane changes that feet would have. That’s something for later though.
As I mentioned above I will now start looking into hair and clothes. What I’ll likely do first is model the skintight parts of her outfit and then go from there. Please look forward to the next update!
