young tarzan

First of all I have to apologize to anyone who follows my progress regularly.  I have been lacking in my updates to this site!  Between the holiday season, being swamped at my day job, and working on the new house there has been little time for updates.  That doesn’t mean that I haven’t been working on some things recently though.

As an update to my previous post about my Blender World Cup entry, I was awarded one of 10 commendations places.  This is pretty exciting for me, especially since the quality of the entries this year was excellent.  Altogether the process was a great experience for me.  It allowed me to sit down and really focus on finishing one piece of work, rather than jumping around to a number of different projects like I normally do.

The latest project that I have been working on is a 3D model of young Tarzan from the Disney animated movie.  This is by far the most complete character that I have done to date and I’m really happy with the way he turned out.  He has gone from the pages of my sketchbook all the way to a finished and fully rigged character.

The model is pretty straight forward, but is slightly more detailed than anything that I had done previously.  He has a full set of fingers and toes, along with teeth, a tongue, and, albeit tiny, ears.  I tried to focus on good topology throughout the process because I had the ultimate goal of animating him.  All of the textures were hand painted by me in GIMP and, with the help of SSS, give the skin a nice tone.

Tarzan’s classic dread lock hair certainly gave me the most headaches out of everything.  The hair was all done with Blender’s particle system after a lot of messing around with different settings.  There is also a softbody setting added to the hair in order to let it fall naturally.  The softbody combined with Blender’s particle editing panel allowed me to comb the hair and give it a nice hair style.  I had to manually adjust the weights of the different hair strands after combing in order to keep that hair style the same while he was moving.  There are still a few little hiccups with the hair (you can see some hair clumps going through the head during the walk cycle animation), but all in all it came out rather well.  The eyebrows are also a particle system, but without a softbody setting obviously.

His cloth also gave me some minor headaches, but turned out to look pretty good.  Blender’s cloth settings are pretty easy to play around with, however choosing what to parent the cloth too wasn’t the easiest thing in the world.  I also had to adjust the cloth mesh after he was in the starting position of his walk cycle in order to stop it from intersecting with the body mesh.  This is why in the walk cycle it looks a little bit funny around his hips.

Tarzan is completely rigged, including all of his facial features.  The rig is based on a couple of different sources, including the famous Mancandy rig, and also David Ward‘s excellent face rigging tutorials.  The walk cycle was really interesting to work on because it was so different than a typical bipedal walk cycle.  I had to analyze the way a real gorilla walks, then adjust it slightly to work with the longer legs and shorter arms of a human.  This also led to a lot of gorilla walk practicing by my wife and I!

Finally, here is a brief “making of” video that shows some of the progress with this model along the way:

Here is just the finished gorilla walk cycle: