The difficulty was the approach to the shape. I tried making a primitive polygon sphere and then modelled the vertices by hand to create the spherical shape. However, this was time consuming, difficult and the fact it was a polygon primitive meant there would be tri’s that are preferably avoidable.
I also experimented with a smoothed cube. The benefit would be an instantly round shape with no tri’s. The smoothed cube was abandoned as I had difficulty modelling the planar sides. The shape of the head is also difficult to model with a smoothed cube as there is an extremity at the bottom of the head, bellow where the laser cannons are. I was working as if the head was a cube, the sides of the head have six sides which need to be included if the shape is to be recognisable as a Star Wars walker.
The way I eventually modelled the head part was by starting off with a cube and making the shape of the head by extruding faces, until a pre-spherical version was made.
The picture bellow was an attempt to make the head by cutting most of the faces of a polygon primitive sphere, leaving the top and bottom section, then connecting them together by extruding the edges. This did not work as there were more edges on the top then there were at the bottom. To make them connect I would have had to have made tri’s which I wanted to avoid as much as possible.
This picture shows how far I took this head attempt. Also notice how there was no way to get planer sides of the head, without changing some of the polygon sphere vertices.
This shows one of the ways I tried to model the spherical part of the head with a lattice. I used the lattice to pull several vertices up at once to get the spherical part of the head. I hardened the edges of where the head normally ends so it would be visible on a render. In retrospect, I should have continued using the lattice. I gave up on it as when I found that moving the model did not move the lattice also. The lattice would stay still and have transform information on the vertices, making them pull in an undesired way. I now know that if I merely parented the lattice to the head, the lattice would take its transform information from the head and so would have not been a problem when the models transforms were changed.
This shows an undivided version of the head model with most of the edges softened. It was an experiment to see how many subdivisions would look acceptable. This was a very early experiment.
This picture shows how I used a semi-transparent sphere as a reference. It enabled me to move the vertices individually to align the head with the sphere. If you look closely you can see some edges poking out of the sphere as the corners are a lighter shade of grey. The change in shade enabled me to know when the vertices were outside of the semi-transparent sphere.
This is shows the way I modelled the body and legs. As the model is completely symmetrical, I only needed to model one half and then mirror and merge the vertices to complete it. This cuts the modelling time in half if done correctly. However I copped the half of the model several times when having problems with parented joints and UV’s.
This is one version of the finished subdivided model. I experimented with hardening and softening edges to be able to distinguish between the original shape of the ATST and the spherical version I had made. However I felt that people should still be able to recognise the shape without the hardened edges. The hardened edges ended up on the top edge of the model, this looked the most “realistic”.
This is another experiment with different hardened edges. It changes the spherical shape of the head greatly. This version gives the impression of a sphere that has been cut into, which I feel looks more affective.
I subdivided the head again and aligned the vertices by hand to make it look even smoother. I should have used the “smooth” tool as you are able to modify the roundness and where the hard edges are. It would also have been better to smooth the head part out, because if I wanted to fine tune the smoothing later, it would have been available in a “Node”. The way I modelled it by hand, made fine tuning it very time consuming.
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