Armed & Dangerous: Base Mesh Completed

After a couple of weeks, I have finally finished the base mesh for the "Six Armed Nutter". The production of the arms, torso and legs were all pretty straight forward. The biggest problem I had was with the head. Because of the cartooned style I have chosen to use, his mouth is out of realistic proportion. This made it very difficult to work out the shape and topology using the box modelling technique. I ended up using the edge extrusion technique. I found that, when using this technique, it was much easier to work out the correct topology than if I were to use box modelling methods.

(Left) Edge Extrusion Head. (Right) Box Modelled Head.

As shown above, the head on the left has a mouth that better matches the original proportions shown in the concept art, although the topology is a bit messier than I would ideally like.
The body, arms and legs were all made with boxes and cylinders with their werts moved into the correct position.
After the model was finished, looked at it in subdivision preview mode and found that random faces appeared and other faces detatched from not being merged properly.  Most of this I managed to clean up with Maya's clean-up tool. The rest had to be manually deleted and merged into it's intended place.

Knowing I would be painting the model in Mudbox and not taking the UVs into Photoshop to edit the textures I felt it was save to create the UVs with Automatic mapping. Automatic Mapping flattens out the UVs in the quickest way possible whilst not having anything overlap. If I were taking them into Photoshop, I may then take the time to straighten up the UVs to be clearer.

Once this was done I found it safe to take the model into Mudbox. However, after taking the model into Mudbox, I found that some of the geometry creased in certain areas. Mainly around the forehead between the eyes and at the crotch. This was due to having too many edge loops running throught the middle of the mesh. I had added these when I had miscalculated the number of edge loops need to attach the head and trousers to the torso. However, now that the meshes had been combined, I found it fairly easy to delete a few of these. Only with one did I have to rearrange the geometry around the chin to effectivly get rid of it. This also, by chance, removed some of the polgons making up and meeting at the center of the eye. There is still a 5-pole in the centre of each, but I am considering sinking these into eye sockets and then using 2 spheres inside each other for the actual eyeball.

Front and Side view of the final base mesh

Depending on how the sculpt goes, I may model the hair in maya and then bring it into mudbox. I may also make some weapons for him, since the them of the competition is "Armed and Dangerous".