Starting off

This project was kind of inspired by Van Helsing Frankenstein. After watching the movie I thought I could create a better freak than that! So I did…. God knows why?
I have to say I had nothing to start off with on paper. Its not that I'm bad at drawing, its just that the project was so spontaneous. Onto the 3d stuff I said to myself and the design was clear in my head, man Vs lantern. lantern wins over man simple, ‘Magic Lantern man'. I would have to confess if you want to do this properly make a design on paper
first.

Reference

When I looked for reference I referred to href="http://www.3d.sk/" target="_blank"> www.3d.sk for human reference and clothes then looked at Alan Moore's ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' comics for ideas on Victorian technology which seemed to be a perfect place to start as it was full of pages of insane Victorian machinery and weirdo's.

Getting a Template

First I looked through my archive for a male model to use as a template. If you do decide to create a lot of different human figure characters its worth your time creating ‘naked' male and female template model. These will provide you with something to build from and save you a lot of time, rather than have to start from scratch. When you do create the template just work on one side of the body and use a symmetry modifier or a mirrored instance to see the result. Only one side of the mesh will be required for template models. For this model I also added a range of walk and run animations for skin testing,
with the first frame being set for the Christ ‘skin' pose.

For the mesh I used a stack that combined these modifiers

• Symmetry
• Skin
• MeshSmooth

This gave me the chance to test out the skin while allowing me to modify the mesh. Rather than having to apply and check all the time.

*Tip*
If required you can turn off a modifier giving more processing power. Or set the modifier to work only when rendering This rule mostly applies to MeshSmooth, which slows down things even when not subdividing.



Good enough I tell myself. He won't look that pretty soon. Notice the old school max.3 bones and a set of teeth I have to say I do prefer the old school approach for setting up bones and IK's, with less IK helpers and bone constraints, which can fill a scene up with lots of extra information and objects. But this is all just a question of taste