Maya - DINOSAURS in the household! (thought you'd want to know) (part 3)

Terrible harry potter references aside, this is slightly behind schedule as i actually have done the follow up to this already, but this will be the continuation of the model done in the last part to complete the dinosaur model's basic geometry.

This is where we left off last time, so i still have to dust off the rest of the arms and feet for the model till we can judge it done.

Nice and simple start, just a little bit of tweaking to some of the vertices and then extruding the edge loops to create the arms, extrusions are rather interesting because it can easily reveal mishaps with the layout of the edges,vertices or faces it comes from as it extends from them, so i adjust vertices after extruding the arms since i noticed him malformed they were in some area's.

Well these were difficult, due to my mesh having slightly more vertices and edges comparative to my walkthrough the claws were slightly harder to bring out, and meant i had to extrude certain edges then extrude a face and loop the vertices there in order to "split" the face into two claws.

This definitely highlights the use of multiple viewpoint use as i forgot to use this and had to alter some of the vertices cause the claws looked ridiculous from certain angles.

And there are the completed claws, a little longer than their reference, but i thought these were more fitting to the rest of my model (it doesn't deviate that much so i'm still properly following instructions) the major parts were actually pretty fine, just some extrusions and scaling down to provide the claw like shape, the problem came (again) with the little details to get the segments of hand and claw to flow appropriately, definitely a test of judgement here.

Realised that i'd actually done one extra extrusion at the ankle so i just moved the vertices to give me the base of the foot.

oh boy was this confusing, didn't know from my instructions whether i was extruding the faces for the toes individually or all together, at first this seemed like an indivudal thing, though later i merged the vertices so that this segment had the faces joined. 

Anyway this phase was just extruding and pulling and adjusting to make the segments of the toes.

bit of a leap in screenshots and this was sheerly due to figuring out what i was doing, the difference between being shown something a reading instructions is that if anything leaps at all in a step it's hard to tell in what order things were done; so first it was clear i had to add edge loops, and then scale them to add the flaring and contracting of mass on the toes. but the hard part was figuring out where the edge loops had to go, so in the end i had to go with a guess and just adjust the vertices from here to line them up as well as i could.

 And bam done, the model was kind of an odd experience since some moments it was easier than i expected and then the opposite a moment later, and it was less about anything new but more a refinement on the techniques i already new. I felt that i definitely am getting better at my own judgement for the tool use to use to make models, as i felt myself not really knowing how to create certain shapes (more whether i was using the one that i was intended to) but i can still say that i'm coming to terms with some of maya's utilities, which is more than can be said for how i felt when i started this course. Though i would still say that i could do with improving the speed of my modelling since unlike the previous part i had to use my own time to finish the model.

All in all a fun few weeks of lessons and a pretty good model came out of it. Rawr.