Thoughts On Modeling; Teamwork, Character Type

I thought I'd expand a little on what I said the other day about how some places want to see production sketches for your models.

As a modeler you're going to be part of a team. As part of a team this means you don't do everything yourself, like Miles said. With that laid down, I don't think it's a bad idea to model something that isn't your creation. You don't want to only model stuff that you didn't come up with on your reel, but modeling someone else's creative product can be a very good way to grow creatively, technically, and from a design perspective.




The Orc wins, by the way. Here's another thought;

Character modeling for different genres. Say you've got a character that will always be wearing a specific outfit, whatever it may be. In this case, you may not ever need to model the character without that stuff on. That's great, you build the character up with armor/outfit on and everything.

Now let's hop over to games like WoW, WAR, EQ (I know, I mention these a lot). You need a naked model, because pieces of gear need to be interchangeable, and let's face it - some people like to cruise around nekkid and dance on top of mailboxes. The character isn't literally naked, but the model is. The example above from WAR is to illustrate a character that needs to have everything modeled, versus a character that will never change. It's not that great of an example, but if the pig had gear on that hid part of his organic model, you'd get the picture.

So keep that in mind. What world does your character go in? Are they always in their gear, or are they an avatar that's meant to have different objects attached to their body?

If people are interested in organic modeling, I think we should throw up some image planes/concept drawings of our own on here so that people can model off of them if they wish.