Doc:Tutorials/Animation/BSoD/Character Animation/Modeling the body

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[edit] Modeling the body

In this section of the tutorial, we'll create the body.

[edit] Neck and shoulders

Delete the vertex shown in Delete vertex to extrude neck.
{AMB|B}} to loop-select the surrounding vertices, and extrude downward to form the neck (Extruding the neck.
Shape the neck vertices so they're more even with each other, and loop cut (Ctrl R) as shown in Reshaping neck and loop cut. This will give us more vertices to work with when creating the shoulder.

When to use loop cut

During this tutorial you've been making many loop cuts. Most of the time, the way I know to tell you to make a loop cut is because after trial and error, it looks like the next couple steps are going to need some extra vertices to make things come out correctly.

When you're making your own model, generally you'll try to work with the vertices you have, and then make loop cuts or add vertices when you find you can't make the shapes you want with the vertices you have.

For the case of the loop cut you just made, I tried making the shoulder without the extra loop cut, and found it would be difficult. So I backed up a couple steps and made the loop cut, and that's where we are now.

Extrude the neck and shape it as in Extruding the neck and reshaping 2.
Extrude only the front three vertices down, as in Extruding the chest.

Delete vertex to extrude neck.

Extruding the neck.

Reshaping neck and loop cut.

Extruding the neck and reshaping 2.

Extruding the chest.

Extrude the top corners of the shoulder down (Building the shoulder 1.
Make triangle faces out of the newly extruded vertices and the neighboring vertices (Building the shoulder 2).
Extrude the bottoms of the triangles down (Building the shoulder 3).
Extrude the front middle two vertices down (Building the shoulder 4).
Make a quad face in the obvious spot (Building the shoulder 5).
Make a quad face on the back to close the mesh (Building the shoulder 6).
Connect the front and back below the armpit by selecting the 2 vertices and hitting F to make a 2-vertex face - that is, an edge (Building the shoulder 7).
Extrude the new edge downward to make a face (Building the shoulder 8).
Loop-cut the newly created face (Building the shoulder 9).
Finally, reshape the shoulder area so that the empty hole forms the shape of the arm (Shaping the root of the arm).

Building the shoulder 1.

Building the shoulder 2.

Building the shoulder 3.

Building the shoulder 4.

Building the shoulder 5.

Building the shoulder 6.

Building the shoulder 7.

Building the shoulder 8.

Building the shoulder 9.

Shaping the root of the arm.

Loops and poles

You may have found that Alt RMB sometimes doesn't select the whole loop you were expecting it to. This happened to me when trying to quickly select the vertices making up the root of the arm.

The reason is that sometimes an edge loop can be broken. In the case of the vertices in Shaping the root of the arm, the upper vertices each have five edges emerging, while the rest have only four. These vertices with extra edges are called "poles", and tend to break up edge loops.

[edit] Extruding the arm

Next, we'll make the arm by extruding, moving, and scaling rings of vertices.

Select the ring of vertices shown in Shaping the root of the arm.
Extrude the vertices, move them to the right, and scale them a little.
Extrude, move, and scale for a total of 6 extrusions (Extruding the arm 1-6).
Note that we're putting an extra loop around the elbow. That will help it bend better when we start animating.

Extruding the arm 1.

Extruding the arm 2.

Extruding the arm 3.

Extruding the arm 4.

Extruding the arm 5.

Extruding the arm 6.

[edit] Making the hand

Now we'll make the hand. It'll be a simple "mitten" type hand, we're trying to keep it simple here . . .

Extrude the end of the arm several times to make the hand (Extruding the hand).
Widen the hand (NumPad 7 for top view, S to scale, MMB to constrain scale axis), as in Widening the hand from top view.
Close off the end of the hand with faces (F, Closing off the hand).

Extruding the hand 1.

Extruding the hand 2.

Extruding the hand 3.

Extruding the hand 4.

Widening the hand from top view.

Closing off the hand 1.

Closing off the hand 2.

Closing off the hand 3.

Shaped hand, with square face to extrude thumb from.

Thumb extruded from hand.

Now spend some time shaping the hand. I prefer to turn Subsurf on in Edit Mode when doing this kind of work.
While you're shaping, make room for the thumb to be extruded. I made sure there was a square face for the thumb to be extruded (Shaped hand, with square face to extrude thumb from).
Extrude the thumb from the hand, as in Thumb extruded from hand.

A note on extruding constrained to an axis

You may notice that when you extrude, there is a orange line that the extruded region moves along. This is so that the extruded faces have the same orientation as the "parent" face. To cancel this constrained move, MMB

to get into free move mode.

The character so far is shown below. Next, we'll create the rest of the torso and make some legs.

The character so far.

[edit] Creating the torso

The bulk of the torso is very easy - it's just a couple of extrudes. The trick is to shape it to give it some mass, so it doesn't look like a square chunk. It begins to get a little tricky when we set up the lower torso for the legs.

Extruding the torso.

Extrude the lower edge loop several times to form the torso. Here, I've extruded three times: Extruding the torso.
Now we have to make room for the legs. It gets tricky to explain, just follow the images:
Extrude just the front-most edge and the back-most edge once (Making room for the legs 1).
Extrude the remaining vertices in the original loop once - including one of the vertices you just extruded from (Making room for the legs 2).
Extrude the front-most and back-most edges once more (Making room for the legs 3).
Connect the newly extruded edge loops with faces - one in the front (Making room for the legs 4) and one in the back.

Concave quads

Sometimes when creating a face (like the face I just tried to create in the last step) you may get an error message like this:

Specifically, that means there's a concave section in the quad you're trying to make. Here's an example of a concave quad. You'll get an error trying to make a face with this:

See the middle vertex on the left? It makes a "dent" in the quad. To fix it, move that vertex out a little bit:

Now you can make a quad out of these vertices.

Making room for the legs 1.

Making room for the legs 2.

Making room for the legs 3.

Making room for the legs 4.

Before shaping the torso - looks like a block of cheese!

Now it's time to shape the torso. Here's what my character looked like before a few minutes of shaping:

After shaping the torso - maybe cheesy, but not like a block . . .

And after about 5 mins of shaping . . . and about 150+ vertex moves with G- LMB :
Now we have to close off the bottom of the torso.

Make a face connecting the front and back, as in 'Closing off the bottom of the torso.
Loop-cut (Ctrl R the new face, as in Loop cutting the bottom of the torso.
Now shape the root of the leg so it's a little more circular (Shaping the root of the leg).

Closing off the bottom of the torso.

Loop cutting the bottom of the torso.

Shaping the root of the leg.

[edit] Extruding the legs

Extruding the legs is pretty straightforward. Making the feet is a little different from the hands - mostly because of the 90 degree angle the feet make with the legs.

'Extruding the leg 1.

'Extruding the leg 2.

'Shaping the legs.

Extrude the vertex ring at the root of the leg, and shape it so the vertices are more or less on the same plane (Extruding the leg 1).
Extrude the legs some more. Make sure you have three edge loops close together for the knees so that the leg will bend better when animating (Extruding the leg 2).
Spend some time to shape the legs (Shaping the legs).

Problems with fused vertices when shaping

When shaping the legs, you might run into a problem like this, where the vertex you're moving suddenly snaps to the plane of the mirror:

Fused vertices.

This happens because Do Clipping is enabled. The vertex I was moving in this case got too close to the mirror plane, so Do Clipping thought it should be snapped to the plane. There are two ways to fix this:

Turn off Do Clipping, move the vertex where you want it to go, then turn Do Clipping back on again.
Keep Do Clipping on, but decrease the Merge Limit value. This value determines how close a vertex can get to the mirror plane before being snapped to it. If this value is zero, the vertex has to be right on the plane for it to be snapped.

Mirror modifier panel.

Here is the character so far:

The character so far.

[edit] Creating the feet

Extruding the feet 1.

Extruding the feet 2.

Select the three front vertices by the ankle and extrude them. Extruding the feet 1 shows the extrusion from an oblique view, but it's probably easiest to do the extrusion in side view (NumPad 3).
Keep extruding the three vertices as in Extruding the feet 2 and Extruding the feet 3. Note, in Extruding the feet 3, I've extruded the vertices along the sole of the foot so that they more or less line up with the vertices on the top of the foot (you may have to click on the image to get a larger view).

Extruding the feet 3.

Now start filling in faces on the feet by selecting four vertices at a time and hitting F to make a face.

Faces on the feet 1.

Faces on the feet 2.

Faces on the feet 3.

Faces on the feet 4.

Faces on the feet 5.

Faces on the feet 6.

Extrude vertices from the sole back to make the heel (Forming the heel 1 and Forming the heel 2)
Make faces with F to fill in the heel. Note that there's a single triangle Forming the heel 3 - there weren't an even number of edge loops on the legs. That's OK, if it ends up being a problem later in animation we can fix it.

Forming the heel 1.

Forming the heel 2.

Forming the heel 3.

Ctrl R to make an edge loop near the sole of the foot (Sole edge loop).
Ctrl R to make an edge loop around the middle of the foot (Middle foot edge loop). These edge loops will give the foot better shape.
Ctrl R to make an edge loop around the ankle. This will allow the transition from the lower leg to the foot to be a little sharper.

Sole edge loop.

Middle foot edge loop.

Ankle edge loop.

Shaping the foot . . . you can of course shape however you want. You're probably beginning to develop your own style of shaping, these images are just the way I did it for this character.
I selected a face loop (CTRL-ALT-MMB) , S to scale, MMB to constrain to a single axis, LMB to confirm (Shaping the foot 1 and 2).
Then I pushed and pulled vertices to shape the foot. This took me a little while to get right (Shaping the foot 3).

Shaping the foot 1.

Shaping the foot 2.

Shaping the foot 3.

[edit] The finished model, with .blend file

Congratulations! If you made it this far, you've probably learned a lot about how to model in Blender. If you're like me, you might have had to try this quite a few times until it came out right.

After a little bit of cleaning up, here's the finished model, ready for materials, rigging, and animating:

The finished body.

And the best part: here's the file available for download.

Media:Tutorial_body.blend

Time to give this guy some clothes, some color, and some facial expressions.

Onward!