The Making of the Giant - Ben Clark - Page 1

The Making of the Giant

This article will take you through the various stages I used to create Keith Thompson's Giant character, from initial setup and block-in all the way through to final renders in Unreal3 engine.

Let's see the final result first:

I am still very much learning this whole process, this isn't necessarily the best way to do this, it just what worked for me on this project.

I won't be covering the steps in detail but this should help to explain my workflow and the reasons for some of the decisions I made along the way. This article assumes that you have a decent grasp on modeling and texturing. I have always wanted to document this process from start to finish and I hope it helps some people. My workflow for this model was...

I prefer to build a quick and messy block-in mesh first. This is because I find it a lot easier to get the topology looking good with a retopology pass. It also allows you to make design changes as you progress with your model and not be bound by the shape and topology of a low poly mesh created earlier.

The drawback to this workflow used to be that you end up with a high res model that doesn't have UVs assigned to it. The transfer UV's tool introduced in Maya 8 now solves this problem by allowing you to copy you low res UV coordinates onto you high res mesh