This section will cover the details on the main part of the character (not the tech arm). This will include the rest of the coat hanging down, hair, and completing the rest of the details in order to ready him FOR the tech arm.
First things first, when flipping my half character with an instanced Mirror and analyze my character I note how he looks wrongly proportioned on the whole. As the main reference for the work so far has served it's purpose I can now start tweaking my character freely in order to make it look correct in the 3D realm.
This brought about moving the vertices in the legs to be longer (noting that the knee area still needs to have the flexing vertices to work properly. In fact I rotated the vertices around the knee to work better in a flexing environment. Also, even after making the legs longer (and slightly thicker along certain axis) the arm seemed too long. So I did the same here, reducing the overall length of the arm until I found a satisfactory position.
You may note that the legs seem a lot thinner than the torso. This is intentional as the torso has a coat over the top, making it a lot thicker in appearance. The legs may need some further tweaking, but after I have created the rest of the coat to compare.
The hands and feet look very large in comparison to my body, this is intentional. I just like characters with big hands and feet :)
By selecting the bottom edge of the torso I was able to Shift / Move the edges down and create a basic cylinder that I could then tweak to this result. Note the extra polygons on the coat around the knee area? This is for when I animate the character.
I had to tweak some of the leg in order for there to be no polys coming through to the outside.
Here is an image of my evil mad scientist twin! :) I think it's the bald head. Although at 2670 polygons, he's not THAT evil. :)
For the hair we will need the original reference again, so pull that up (hopefully you didn't delete it) and edit the top of the head to suit the basic shape of the hair.
As my hair is spiky it's a little difficult to get the effect easily. I have roughed out the shape however as if it were solid, as dicky as it looks I have faith in the abiliities of texturing to save me :)
I only had to really worry about the front, the back and top area was moving what vertices were already there. The top, for example, I selected all the vertices of the top 4 'rows' and then scaled them along all 3 axis. That got me started and into blending in the front element after deleting the couple of front polygons. That hair is really going to give me nightmares though :)
Beverley Hills 90210 here we go! (I might have to change my hairstyle to the dreads :)
3DTotal
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Once done we are at a stage where we can make me whole. If you have a flipped instanced model, you won't be able to attach it to your original model. Delete it and flip it once again as a copy. Attach the two models together and line up the two as good as possible down the centre.
If the centre vertices do not line up select them all and scale them along the one axis using the selection pivot to flatten them all. You should then be able to weld the vertices together without to much of a problem. Be sure to weld the ones you want, my cloak for example does not want to be welded from the belt down (except for the back of course).
To save on polys (and depending on what your model it can save quite a lot of them) you can make the 2 polys at the centre that are now joined in the centre into one (or two triangles instead of 4). Anywhere that is to be a flat area potentially has the ability to be merged into the one poly. In particular would be the back of my character. I have left the front with the middle line so I can use smoothing groups to imply a seam.
The character so far has a polycount of 2625. More than reasonable to go straight into the game if need be. But we have probably the most poly unfriendly thing to go yet, the tech arm.
