Modelling Tato’s Body

Modelling Tato’s body was overall a straight forward process due to his simplistic design. However there we’re several things to keep in mind when creating his geometry.

The character’s arms and legs would need a sufficient mesh density to allow for exaggerated deformations and smear frames.
The character’s body topology would have to be set up in such a away that would enable appealing body deformations as well as good facial poses.

I gathered up a library of references of topology from other rigs and models to see how they approached topology, in addition to coming across several useful tutorials that covered the modelling of several different appendages such as the hands and teeth etc.

For the arms and legs, I looked at the Max rig (by Peter Starostin and James Huntas) as reference for the arms and legs.

Max Arms and Legs

What I liked about the topology set up on Max was that the modeller has clearly communicated where the key deforming areas on the character are. They’ve achieved this by adding extra mesh resolution (edgeloops) where the deformations are going to be resonating from, highlighted using yellow in the images provided above. This in turn can be useful for the rigger as it communicates where initial joints should be place.

For the hands specifically, I also found this tutorial by Alex Cheparev very useful as he takes you through the hand modelling process from start to finish.

For Tato’s body, I found that iAnimates character rig Blurp to be an incredibly useful reference as the characters body set up would be similar to Tato’s.

Specially I used Victor Vinyals animation demonstration as a key reference source.

From this clip, I captured a still image to study and guesstimate the topology/edge-flow of the mouth in relation to the rest of the body.

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As seen on the image above I’ve highlighted the poles the exist on the mesh, Normally i’d try to avoid the use of poles on a rigged character as when used improperly will result in pinching when the mesh is smoothed. However, it doesn’t seem to cause any unappealing artefacts when the character moves which gives me the impression that I may have I bit more wiggle room to work with when modelling Tato’s Body.

When it came to the modelling itself I worked off my references. As shown below, I’ve added more resolution to the mesh where the the character will be deforming, including the elbow,wrist and fingers. When it came to modelling the mouth I tried to replicate the topology found on the Blurp Rig, however I moved the poles a bit further out from the mouth to minimise on unappealing deformations or artefacts on the character mesh.