Using Maya for a character design

To step away a bit from constantly making lamps I decided to try and create a character I have created in my own time called L3D.


Below is my current design for L3D, a simple levitating robot.

L3D is pretty simple which is why I decided to try and make him, as I could use him as a practice model for UV mapping. The body was simply made from a sphere whilst his head is just a sphere and a bent circular pyramid, created using the same tool to bend the neck of my gumball lamp. The hands however were a lot harder to create, and I started off with flattened spheres and some cylinders as seen below. However I decided to leave these for quite a while as I could not figure out how to create the fingers properly.

I decided to leave this model for quite a while since I really did not know how to create the hands (although it was recommended multiple times that I create them in ZBrush, I wanted to test what I could really do in Maya, and focus on more natural objects in ZBrush). I eventually realised how I could create the hands after a Maya session which briefly showed us the Bridge function, essentially creating a connection between two selected faces or edges.

I created the fingers by creating two cylinders and a cone, rotating and moving them into position and then bridging them along the flat faces. Then I simply tweaked the new edge created during bridge so that it was more pointed as opposed to a flat line.

We was also shown materials in Maya and how different ones work in different ways, such as Blinn being good for metals, so I decided change the material of L3D's model to this since he is meant to be a robot, as well as changing the colour to green.

All that is left now really is to finish off the palms and merge or combine the two separate parts of the head.