Modelling my Teddy Bear

Before opening Maya, I sat down and drew three reference images of what my bear is going to look like, as I mentioned in part 2 I haven’t included the ripped up nature of the teddy bear that I want as I believe creating a base shape first and then removing things after will be easier.

These are what I came up with:

Happy with how they look I moved into Maya and opened my reference images using image planes with I then lined up with one another in the centre of my project. At this point I also made sure to set my project.

As I said I would in the last part, I used spheres and the smooth selection tool get build up the general shape of my teddy bear using the references images I had set up as my guidelines.

You might have noticed that there is only one eye and ear for this version. I decided to do this as it made more sense to me to only quad draw one and then duplicate it. I did in fact do this with the arms and legs as well, but it didn’t occur to me until after I had already done the sphere and smooth selection step.

When I started to quad draw over my initial mesh I made sure to do every shape separate as I said I would in the last part, this was down to how I want the bear to be able to move when I come to rig it later on.

In comparison to the first model I made I am extremely happy with how this one turned out. The shape of the model on its own gives the illusion that it is a bear that has some structure it to, like a knitted bear would.

When showing my model to my lecturer he suggested adding a watch to show some other modelling techniques as I hadn’t showcased any type of hard surface modelling and adding a watch would allow me to do that. I added the watch to the bear’s right arm when you look at the model from the front.

The most logical step next to me is to start texturing my model so that is what I aim to do next.