Smooth... a boot, knee, and neck story.

     I have not really had much time to work on my modeling in the last couple days. However, I did manage to make some progress on Ralph. I learned how to use subdivision surface modifiers and how to toggle them on and off to work on your mesh. I've snapped a screen shot to show the progress. I did have time to straighten out some geometry. I was trying to get everything lined up the best I could to make texturing easier.

     You can see how the subdivision surface modifier really helped round out the mesh. He looks more natural. Nature doesn't have straight lines, well not very often anyways. I shortened up the back of his boots to make them look a bit more realistic. I went through and straightened the geometry there too. Then moving up his leg to the knee. Oh, I would also like to add that this mesh has a mirror modifier too. That's how everything is so symmetrical. Now, back to the knee. I added a couple of edge loops to add definition and also make it a tad easier to animate later. His hips and lower back look pretty decent now. His neck was a mess. That took a while to straighten out. I ended up just deleting all the vertices in his neck and redoing the geometry from scratch. It was that terrible. Not sure how it got like that. Maybe when I was trying to extrude the head from the neck.

     Here is a render of whats done so far. I need to work on lighting. Does anyone know of a good tutorial for lighting? I could really use the help there. I put him in space, just for fun, ha! Overall, I'm feeling very good about this model. I cannot wait to work on him some more!

     -Eric