After the last stage I was pretty much done with the model for this portion of the project. I had grown quite attached to him and was looking forward to posing him for renders. However, first things first I had to make my morphs. I use morphs for the facial expressions of the character and lip syncing and although this can be a pain in the ass to model it really does make all the difference when it comes to rendering. You can have so much fun just playing with the expressions.

Below are all the morphs I used on this guy. I use Jonny Gordons book "Cartoon Character Creation" (www.amazon.co.uk/Lightwave-Cartoon-Character-Creation-Animation/) as a basic guide for the morphs I might need. It gives you pretty much everything you need for a common rig and then you can just add your own as you need them.

This was the first render after all of the above. The texturing accomplished here is mainly using weight maps to colour in areas of the face and hands. The clothes are basic procedurals and post effects. My unwrapping and texturing skills leave a lot to be desired so this method gives me enough to get the model from default grey to something that resembles a textured model. I also used a skin shader that is part of Lightwave to get the skin lighting and Subsurface Scattering.

I then used a simple rigging setup from T4D to give me some control over the mesh (as I suck at rigging). I was pretty happy with him and decided to show him to a few folks here (www.spinquad.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21342) on Spinquad (a Lightwave forum). I got some pretty good feedback and some tips on how to improve him as well. I had grown quite attached to him at this stage and decided that I should spruce him up a bit with some of the modelling changes people had mentioned on that thread.

Some fixes later:
After the feedback received on the above thread I made most of the changes suggested. They were all very valid and really helped the model come into its own. I basically used methods similar to those listed above to add buttons and a pocked to the shirt. I also updated the hands slightly and fixed the shoes into something a little more shoe like. After this I decided to have some fun. Up until this point the character was just a self portrait for use on my site. And I wanted to show him off but not in the usual random pose so I gave him a little story based on my usual consumption of wine. I made a wine glass prop and posed him awkwardly into the positions in the following shot :P

Other uses:
I have yet to use this guy for anything major, however he has appeared in a friends university project as an astronaut:

And will soon be appearing in Fetch as an Ice Cream man so lord knows what other uses I will find for him down the line.

Conclusion:
I am not sure if all of the above was useful or not, but I hope it kept you entertained and hopefully you managed to learn something (even how not to do it). My basic idea with modelling is to have fun with it and enjoy the process and the end result. I have a lot to learn and hopefully I will get the chance over the next few months/years to do that. Working with the guys on CGTalk and Collabunlimited is a great idea for anyone looking to learn and motivate yourself into completing a project so if this motivates you to try your hand at modelling or you want to get involved in a collaboration please drop into any of the threads on CGTalk or on Collabunlimited.com and say hello.

Look forward to seeing you there, TheFreak!

About the Author
My name is Richard Walsh (aka TheFreak), I am a full time Web/Graphic Designer working for myself in Ireland in a company called Zoocreative. I have been modelling on and off for a long time. Way too long to not be a master of the craft, but I was more off than on when it came to modelling. I usually model when I am I the mood to do so and these stints usually only lasts a month or two in any 6-8 month period. This explains why it has taken me so long to get to this point & to write this article for collabunlimited. I am self taught, this means I used tutorials/books and the people on forums like CGTalk.com & SpinQuad.com to help me get to where I am. So if you like this stuff then there is nothing stopping you doing it yourself. Just don’t take as long as me to get there :P