Recently, I got the drive to learn 3D modelling once again! I’ve been determined to make one good model, particularly a character one, but haven’t gotten any really finished.
As pictured above, I tried modelling Furdman02’s Sonic OC, Maya the Mako Shark. Furdy provided a really good model sheet, which I’ll link here, which seemed to have provided enough detail to make a 3D model out of. With the help of the tutorial playlist below, I started to follow along.
I started out with the chest, arms, legs, feet, and torso just fine, but I had trouble figuring out how to model the head, hands, and her tail. To be honest, I either haven’t looked deep enough for other tutorials that concern features like this or didn’t think how hard it’d be. My usual problem with trying to model the tail was that I’d have the left view aligned but not have the front aligned, making it look more like a beaver tail than the shark tail I wanted.
Also it becomes hard to manipulate the shape from the front view and doesn’t align like it should look like.
Plus, in the video, the artist had a drawn reference of the hands from the top-down angle, which my ref did not. This leaves with the choice of either referencing an official 3D model of a Sonic character and model it after that or just try to wing it. As of writing I haven’t progressed past the torso, arms, chest, legs, and feet.
However, the journey doesn’t end there, as I started another 3D modeling project today.
I want to make a 3D model of Lum, personally because there aren’t any preexisting models of her that you can download online and I wanted to put her in as a character mod in Left 4 Dead 2. I used this fanart as a starting point because I felt this was the kind of style I wanted to see on the final 3D model. My idea is to use multiple reference images to create a composite model of her, as this image isn’t a model sheet, so moving and rotating images will probably happen throughout the making of this model.
To be honest, it’s not starting out too pretty, and I think I might start from scratch, but keep the references intact.
I’m not sure if these will ever see a day where they’re fully finished or if I’ll even still care about working on them in the end, but gosh would be impressive to see them in a finished form, so stayed tuned in case there’s a part two to this.
