Getting Sobered Up with Richard Walsh
and The Drunk Guy

Source: Collabunlimited and Richard Walsh (aka TheFreak).

About this Article
The purpose of this article is to step you through (as best as I can) the process I used to make my “Drunk Guy” model. This is by no means the best model in the world but it might give you an insight into how someone like me gets started on these things. Hopefully it will also give you an idea of how you can get started on stuff like this and then join us on one of our collaborations.

Over the next few pages I will be bombarding you with poorly taken screenshots and half finished concepts that I hope you can decipher and construct into useful yet meaningless information. I will show you the odd and sometimes incorrect process I use to get my model from concept to reality. So let’s get started....

The Concept
Every good character model starts with a concept or an idea. It should also start with a personality if possible as this will shape the character and move it away from the ‘generic’ lifeless look that is very easy to fall into. This model started life as a caricature of me! I needed a model for my website and so I got to work making a very basic toon version of myself on paper.

I am no artist and my concepts are usually very basic and usually just a head and then I sketch out the body when I get that far into the modelling. Like most modellers I just want to get into the modelling, this is not usually a good thing, as more often than not you end up making the same generic face you always do, and then you get frustrated. So spend a little time sketching out your ideas (even if they suck, they will still be enough to get going). Refer to them often during the modelling process and use them as references if possible.

This is the initial sketch of my toon head. As you can see it was very basic but it gave me enough of an idea of where I needed to go to get the result I wanted. I really should have imported this into Lightwave for a reference but I didn’t bother and just used it as a guide when I thought things were going wrong with the model.

The Modelling
My process of modelling is really not a good learning point for most newcomers and anyone who is good at modelling will probably be hiring contract killers to come after me for destroying their beloved art form. Anyway, the basic premise is that I make it up as I go along. Like I said before I had a VERY rough sketch and this was sitting on a piece of paper beside me as I modelled. I am saying this all now, but in reality good concepts will improve the model and your workflow a million times more than this dodgy half assed approach. However, for casual modelling it can be quite fun to see where it goes and to figure out problems along the way.

I model using the detail-out method. This is basically modelling the detail as you go as opposed to box modelling which gives you the basic shape and you model the detail into that. The model usually begins life as 2 spheres to represent the eyes and then I model the eye sockets, mouth and nose and join everything up into a head after that.

This is a great little tutorial for modelling an eye using the same method (if you are interested) (). I basically use this and just keep going to make the mouth, nose and body. In some instances I will block out detail, like an arm, and then slice it up to add detail but it all starts with extruding edges.

As I work I save increments along the way, this is a great habit to get into as it allows you to quickly step back through your previous versions if you model something you don't like. It also helps when people ask you to write a tutorial AFTER you have made the model... :P So luckily I have most of the steps laid out for this model. This saving feature is part of Lightwave (my modelling app) and its very handy. Not sure if others have it but I am sure they do. I have dabbled in other packages but I keep coming back to LW as I know it and this is just for fun...right!

So basically what I am going to do is talk you through a few of these save files so you can get an idea of how the model was made. To be honest I feel a bit embarrassed showing this stuff, as this model was purely for fun and is a bit of a mess when it comes to polyflow as he was pretty much made up as things went along. Anyway, here goes:

This is the basic shape of the model, as you can see from the concept I had not planned proper eyes for him way back at the start. They were going to be small black spheres so the eye sockets were not needed at this point and the basic shape is very simple. The main modelling at this stage was the mouth and getting it looking correct. Mouths can make or break some models and I remember my early mouths looking like I had taped them on as an afterthought. Although this mouth is simple it still conveys enough emotion to sell the character and that’s all I needed.