Hi all, this is a kind of "Making Of" my character Antonio!, more than a making of this is a bunch of renders I took while making it, and a few screenshots, plus a video and boring text.
This character was created using Blender 2.36, in May 2005. Textures are mouse-made using Photoshop (shame on me). When I was making Antonio I didn't knew that I would do a Making Of (either is my first time at doing this kind of articles), so some parts are re-modelled..
Oh! and his name is Antonio because I was listening to Vivaldi a lot when making it.
So, let's start!
I started with a default cube, then used "Subdivide Smooth", and extruding to make the shape of the head, when the general shape was done, I started with the eyes, for me, the eyes are one of the most important thing to give personality, so there are the first thing I do when making a character. Note that I have enabled SubSurf at level 2 constantly from the beginning and didn't sed Mirror neither.
Also, some Knife tool was used to cut the head twice in the middle, adding vertices to give more detail to the whole head. The eyebrows are simple like erasing the two first faces that we had, select and extrude the edges to the inside, scaling down a bit, and extruding again, too many times as how much detail you want in there. In this video you can see that technique.
Now, put the eyes in there! Those eyes are from one of my characters, in the image above is almost explained how it has been made.
The mouth, I started cuting the head horizontally, twice, then extruding inside, resizing, and finally erasing the selected faces, then select the border edges and extrude again to the inside to make the lips. Now you can keep cuting, and tweaking the head's shape, because it still doesn't looks like a horse.. even like a duck! Tip, try cuting more around the mouth, so then it will be more thickness and easy to move and make some expressions later. Also it helps to give more personality (big eyes and different size for each one, the ears, big nose and small mouth, or vice-versa). Either you could make the jaw smaller if you want to make it look really stupid (like Antonio), because you can see the teeth then. Different eyes, weird looking. Now is when this takes count.
To finish (or so) the head, I added simple ears wich modeling is explained in the image below (yes I like images :D less boring than my poor english).
A work in progress render, so far how this little fella looked at this stage.
The teeth is just a couple of duplicated (linked) tooths put together by hand, rotating over its own center with "RR" (means R twice..).
Modeling the body was as simple as pressing the "E" button while following the picture in the background, nothing really complex indeed. A few minor tweaks (and extrudes) for the tail and legs, once I had the loops right then I started the legs, once again, extruding.
As you can see in the wire view, the legs follow the same loops that came from the upper body. Just one leg was modeled and later duplicated/tweaked for avoiding the symmetrical look, and shape (rear legs are quite different from the front ones).
In the screenshot you can also see the UV mapping for the leg and hoof, at that time Blender didn't have the hability to make MultiUV's, today the texturing task would be so much easier!
Another WIP render, head and body are finally done. Let's put some cloth on this naked animal.
Making the cloth was as easy as selecting a couple of vertices from the body, duplicating with Shift + D, scaling a little along the normals (with Alt + S), and "P" to separate into a new object, extruding down the borders and some tweaking in the edges. In the image at the left you can see the different steps before duplicating, when extruding, and how the final model looks.
Clean model, no textures.
There's is not much to talk about texturing here, just one colour map (left), and a Blend texture for the FallOff effect (wich is explained in this tutorial). Always using Oren-Nayar as shader. Remember, Oren-Nayar is your friend! =)
Once the whole model and cloth textures were done, it was time to add hair. Won't explain here because the system I used in this guy is not used anymore, it was replaced with a totally new system, more info here.
Textures for the horse, bump and colour map, I know they are awful, it was years ago!, oh, and mouse-painted =/
And that's it!, for posing the character I needed to do a quick-simple rig for it, wich you can see in this YouTube video:
(download the video in higher resolution)
Again, nowadays it could be so much easier (and better) to make, in this rig I used Lattices for the cloth, and a couple of hooks (empty) at the bottom for fixing the shape, yes.. I know.. it's UGLY!, but well.. it worked!
The lighting was a simple cube made of Spot type lamps, using Shadows buffer, and Ambient Occlusion was used (it was kinda new when I made this character so I used it everywhere), now we could use the new great Aproximate Ambient Occlusion, wich is really fast!.
However this character rendered (in higher resolution) in half an hour, on a AMD Duron 750Mhz, 320mb RAM.
Well.. that's all folks! I thought adding a couple of .blend files here but this character needs a *lot* of fixing with new versions, since it was made in 2005, hair and rigging didn't survive the time.
Hope you like it!
