Cartoon African Baby Elephant

[t_hawkins]

This will be the thread for the next character in my final year personal project at uni.

My character can supposedly speak to animals, this little guy will be his friend.

Here's some of the preliminary studies, sketches and colour tests (really bad, was still learning) I carried out a few weeks ago plus the final character turn that I've just finished.







Development



Final Turn

Decided to make him a little more real to suit my main character, so I'm going for hyper realism I guess..



Just about to start modelling so will hopefully have some progress shots a little later on.

[t_hawkins]

Been modelling for four hours now, here's my progress.. Still very much at the pushing verts stage, lots more sculpting and obviously the head to do but I'm quite happy with the progress.

Hoping to get this character finished around the 5-6000 tri mark, but we'll see.. Currently sitting at 1,640 tris.





Any comments/critique much appreciated!

=]

[t_hawkins]

Having some issues modelling the head, I've decided to model my elephant mouth open now as I want it rigged but I'm getting a little stuck finding the correct topology.. Particularly around the mouth.

I've looked all over the place for topology reference but have only found bits and pieces with no close-ups of the head.

Does anyone know of any good reference or tutorials? I know it's pretty specific.

Any help would be awesome.

Cheers.

[t_hawkins]

Here's some more WIP shots of my Elephant, intended to get this finished and start unwrapping today but was called in to fulfil my duty as lead animator in my games development team. So only really had an hour or two to work on it tonight.

Head was completed yesterday, then I connected it up to the body and since then I've just been going through the model adding more detail where needed and just generally fleshing him out, looking at reference as I go.

I know he's looking very happy at the moment, but I wanted him to be cute and friendly and I'm just hoping once I have some teeth and a tongue in there it won't look so daft!

I'm guessing probably about another couple of hours work on this needed before I start my unwrap tomorrow; need more shape in the legs, and obviously the mouth needs sorting then I can start sculpting hopefully.

[Philly13]

Nice clean topology! Also love the sketches

[t_hawkins]

thanks dude! =D

[t_hawkins]

Finished the elephant at 5,296 tris.

Legs took a little longer than expected as I had to think about where I wanted the joints to be and how to shape the topology around them.

I've done a few characters geared towards animation now so it was just a case of spacing out the verts where the legs were going to come together and pinching the verts together on the other side to allow smooth deformation.

Here's some screenshots with both the wireframe and smoothed model in 3ds Max.

[t_hawkins]

Quick update to show the progress on my sculpt.

[Polygoblin]

The sculpt looks great, and I'm especially impressed with your sketching and pre-production

The feet and ankles look thin to me. I know baby elephants don't have massive feet like their elders, but they are still proportionately larger than what you have. I know you are past the point where fixing this is easy, but let me try to explain this anyways...

From what I can see from reference, it looks like the feet and ankles should have about 15-20% more girth. As of now, they look more like hooves. Basically, the foot should be as wide as it's shoulder-blade. This might also fix the problem you are having with the legs looking too long, as well You should be able to scale things out slightly without having to re-UV and scupt and stuff.

Hope this helps.

[t_hawkins]

Thanks dude, scaled up the legs in max and he looks a lot better.. Will follow with a screenshot soon but there's summat up with my video card I think cause I'm getting loads of weird pixels covering my viewports in max, photoshop and mudbox atm! =/

Originally Posted by Polygoblin

15-20% more girth.

lol.

=]