Hand-Sculpted Bear Character

Courtesy of Anthony Hadjimarkos

"To create this image, I first drew a few concept sketches of a bears head, then chose my favorite. I sculpted it out, and scored a grid on it. After that, the model was digitized using the MicroScribe Connections for Maya plug-in. In the plug-in I used a custom Reference Frame for the origin. I had No Filter turned on so that I could control exactly where my Vertices would lie.

After I had the grid to look at, I built the model using subdivisional surfaces. I saved at least ten hours of time by knowing exactly where to place my vertices. After creating half the face, I mirrored it, attached it. I then converted the subdivisional model to polygons where I merged the vertices along the seam. After that I reconverted it back to subdivisional surfaces. This took me about ten minutes. I made duplicates of the face, which I used as blend shapes in order to create the expression I wanted. That took about twenty minutes.

Being able to trace out the wireframe on the tangible sculpture helped me to save running speed, render time, and space on unnecessary geometry, as well as plan for an easily animatable face. Beyond that, the grid in real life allowed me to capture all the facial features I desired. Almost no changes were necessary to add any detail beyond the original grid on the bear sculpture. All textures were created in Maya. The teeth, eyes, hand, and background were modeled by hand in Maya.

It took me five hours to digitize the face. The final count of Faces in the polygon mesh is 1578."

Learn more about Immersion's tutorial on digitizing in Maya.