Making Dreg

Dreg's a sorta horse face man. Why he's a horse face man is due to his peculiar genetic history; he is half human, half alien, which implies that someone had sex with an alien. I guess whatever rocks your boat... and judging from Dreg, a pretty ugly alien too. Some people are desperate I guess.

Anyway, I sketched him a lot, and I sketched him some more, because let's face it, he's really cool and fun to sketch. The thing is, eventually I was going to have to model him in glorious 3D, which takes considerably more time than sketching him (by my calculations, about 8928 times longer). Extra points to the person who figures out how I reached that number.

Anyway, from the start, I had decided I wanted to model him NURBS. I'd like to say that I regret that decision now, because it seems fashionable to say that kind of thing, but despite the pain, the huge amount of work, and the occasional gut wrenching scream (actually, those were quite fun) I think in the end it was worth it.

Then I had to do his crotch, and that god-damned arse of his. Man was that a headache. He's got such a tiny waist... that arse still pisses me off. Also, to get that shape to work in Nurbs was horrifically painful, and I am still haunted by sights of what the join between his crotch patch, and his leg patch looks like at a certain, decisive point. This is why his trousers are black. Of course, this was only the beginning of my long, painful relationship with Dreg's arse. Don't read too much into that.

One useful tip: keep on using “global stitch” on patches, to get a smooth seam , then delete history on both patches (so as to cancel the stitch, but keep the smooth seam) then carry on modeling... doing this often, and hours of control vertex pushing/pulling, will lead to smooth seams between patches.

that god damned arse!

Miraculously (knowing 3D) it worked. Naturally, I'm a little chuffed.

The problem with the torso is that it is simply a nurbs cylinder, with a hole at the top for his neck, and a hole at the bottom for his waist. I had no holes for his arms to pop out of, and any attempt to cut one out and creat seamless patches was doomed to total, humiliating failure. So I just kept the torso as it was. Instead (non-animators please bare with me here, it gets technical), I made a curve out of the end isoparm of Dreg's arm (Edit Curves -> detach Surface Curves), then I made a duplicate of the curve, scaled up the duplicate slightly, and projected the new curve onto the torso. Then I simply created a loft between the two curves, scaled up the inner hulls of the lofted surface to give it form, and voila, a connection was made. It's important never to delete history on the curves, so that the projected curves stay on the torso and deform with it, and the curve made from the arm stays on the arm... got all that?

For a long time, I tried to model his hands in nurbs, but that was stupidly difficult, so I did them in polygons. That's why Dreg now has weird black wristbands; they hide the seams between his nurbs arms and polygon hands.

Anyway, I had a model, now I had to rig the damn thing.

Arrgh (the primal screams started at around this point I recall.) If I thought the modeling was bad, I had no idea what was coming.

where's the shoulder? In fact, what you see here is not how it ended up... I needed to modify the arm model a little to avoid scaring little children with horrible deformations when he bends his arms...

A good example of how I like my rigs is what I've done for his legs. I have an inverse foot so as to easily control foot bend and toe roll, as well as being able to keep the ankle rotation constant (like, for instance, when his foot is on the floor) and controlling the leg IK. This is controlled by a proxy object (a sphere) which controls the inverse foot's position and rotation, and who's scaleX and scaleZ attributes control the toe roll and foot bend. Also, the pole vector for the leg IK is controlled by a locator which is parented to the aforementioned sphere. This means that I can control nearly all leg movements through this sphere alone, meaning I only need to set keys for one object rather than several.

It's a good thing I experimented a lot before doing all this (I definitely recommended thoroughly researching any technique you're going to use before spending months modeling a model doomed to failure). With stitched patches, it's important you select all patches when you stitch them, not a few at a time. Otherwise, problems will arise when you try to skin the patches to a skeleton. Blendshapes, on the other hand, seem to work fine either way.

I was warned that painting weights was risky with nurbs patches, because you had to make sure that the weight was exactly the same on either side of a seam. Some horrible, gut wrenching things were mentioned about the component editor... not to mention that I hate painting weights at the best of times. I hoped to find a technique that would avoid painting weights all together.

I started with the hardest part; namely, that god-damned arse. I remembered a tutorial Adam Vanner had given us in the second year, where you made a blendshape for the crotch and part of the leg, which changed depending on how much the leg bone rotated. Then this was used as an influence object for the leg, and it worked really well. It took me ages to get it to work. At one low point, I trudged all the way into university, then hunted Adam down and asked him why it wasn't working. The solution was obvious really; I had to go into the attribute editor for the effected skin clusters and turn on “use components”. Man, why didn't I think of that? And here I was thinking it would be something really obscure and unintuitive. Skin clusters. Components. Yeah.

Anyway, that technique didn't work- you see, it's great for rotating the leg in one plane of rotation, but then try rotating it in another dimension, and everything goes to pot. I started trying to figure out how I could get the influence object to know which blendshape to use depending on how the leg was rotated, but it fried my brain. My flatmate Adam Cubitt was trying to think of a clever way to get Euler rotation coordinates of the bone into one variable that could be used to drive the blendshapes, going on about scary things like quaternions an other horribleness, until I decided I wanted to go for another technique.

So I simply used the same technique for the torso (hehehe “simply” he says...). I'll spare you the details of what that was like (the screams got considerably loud at this point).

Then I added blendshapes for the head. This was really easy in comparison to everything else. Blendshapes, yeah... cool.

Anyway, I did a render of the final model posing. He looks like a right show off.

Then as for texturing... shut up! Who needs textures? Bah! Had enough. Need to move on...

In any case, I learned a huge amount modeling Dreg. Maybe, if I have the time and am feeling generous, I could write a couple of tutorials (I know I really could have used a few...). But that sounds awfully like hard work...

Since writing this page I've had to make a few changes to Dreg's head. You can read about them here.