Thinking Outside the Box:
The Many Faces of Kelly Monaco

(Part 1)

By Paul "Villam" Steed

So move you cylinder down to start building with the top here…

Convert the cylinder to an Editable Mesh…

…then using Uniform Scale and Rotate (along the ‘z’ axis only), adjust the vertices to fit within the outline treating each row as a set of points (i.e. don’t grab just one vertex and move it). Start with the top row and move down the leg, scaling, moving and rotating the lines of vertices until they’re all in place based on your outline. Delete any excess vertices when you’re done.

Now hide your side outline, unhide the front outline and go to the front view. Move the leg or outline around so they line up as close as they can be ‘as is’.

Wow. That’s actually pretty close. The tricky part here is to only move the vertices along the ‘x’ axis since we don’t want to screw up the tweaks we did in the side view. If you find yourself without a line of vertices to support the outline then go in and divide and turn edges so you have some extra vertices to work with:

Note I did move the inner thigh vertices up a little to match the outline. This may have impacted the profile from the side, but I know that the inner vertices in the front view make up the side profile. As long as the changes are small, I can move the vertices of the outer edges around if I have to and not affect the work done in the side view. However, to keep the integrity of the ‘lines’ I want to avoid this until I start optimizing later on.

Finally we get everything lined up…

Here’s the leg with the outline guides…

And since I’m rapidly running out of time, here’s the finished leg after it’s been merged with the previously built butt and foot.

That’s it for now. Next installment we’ll go over what I call ‘video modeling’ where you make tweaks and adjustments to your model by analyzing and matching it based on frames from an .avi of Ms. Kelly. Plus, maybe some other cool stuff as well!

Later

ps

- Paul Steed is a 3D artist for id Software. He's currently hard at work on Quake 3: Arena.