Spidude (CLOSED) (CLOSED)

Greetings to all. I'm going to enter the challenge. I'm doing a model of Spiderman the Dude!' hence; Spidude...down at the lake.

This will be my first ever full figure model. 

Good luck to everyone. 

"His SpidDudeness, or uh, SpidDuder, or El SpidDuderino if youre not into the whole brevity thing. The SpidDude."

As promised above, I have done spiderman for this challenge. I have named him Spidude. Advice to the novice (like me) don't try to run before you can crawl. Do not attempt an eight-legged character before you know you can model. Eight limbs equals, in this case, 2 feet and 6 hands...and hands are intimidating. 

I started the model with zsperes. It really gives a great structured mesh. My only regret was that I was so intimidated by the hands (6 of them) that I did not include hands when doing the initial zsphere model. I decided to add them later. Won't do that again. Once I had the mesh basically how I wanted it, I changed it to a poly mesh. I then wasted precious time playing with the mesh's form and started adding detail. Detail that would be under a vest and hair. Anyway, It was fun.

I masked off the size of my takkies, extracted them and imported them into Modo, where I beveled and bashed the mesh to resemble the shoes I wanted. I then cut the 1 takkie off and proceeded with only 1. I uv'd it in Headus, and started tweaking the textures in 3DCoat, PS, Materialize and Modlab, until I got the definition that I wanted. Named them "Dance" and placed a silhouette of a breakdancer on the ankle guard.

Question to the pros. Is it normal to cloth a model before the model is complete? I suspect I was working in reverse...but the task before me was really taunting. I knew I could do simple modelling, so I went for the accessories first. 

Who would have thought that a simple object like a cap could give you such a headache. I modelled 5 caps before I was happy. I then followed texturing pipeline mentioned above, creating textures and tweaking them as I went.

I masked and extracted a pair of pants in a similar fashion as mentioned with the takkies.

and then came the hands....6 freaking hands. 

As mentioned earlier, I regret not including the hands in the offset. Why, because I lost the wonderful, structured mesh I was so desperately trying to maintain before. By adding zspheres, Zbrush creates a group order. When you remesh the model, ZB creates a very useful poly follow and maintains your groups. 

I created the hands separately and then bridged them to Spidude in Modo. It was a daunting task, as I had to manipulate the hands and the arms to have a corresponding number of loops before I could bridge them together. It also ended up with a bulge where the 2 meshes met. (I'm jumping the gun here. The hands joining are depicted in the sequence of images after the below images. 

The hands converted from zspheres so nicely and with very useful flow. The last hand shown (the biggest hand) has the same mesh as the hands shown before it.  I merely selected the dynamic subdivision to see what the hand would act like when sud-divided in my program of choice. I was very impressed with this. 

The vest was done the same way as the shorts and takkies.

The cellphone's mesh is far to heavy. I initially had a Daz Studio primitive in the hand holding the phone. I was going to import a pre-created cellphone but decided to model my own. So I saved the primitive, opened it in Modo and used the same primitive to make the cell phone. I depicted it purely for you to see who Spidude is on the phone with. Its the hookah smoking caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland. I think Spidude could easily have been a character in Alice...lol.

The series of models shown depicts Spidude in various stages of work. Once I had the takkies, cap and shorts completed, I decided to tackle Spidude. I had no idea how to go about posing him. I tried to rig a zsphere skeleton to him, which eventually proved to technical for my exploding brain. I had never posed a non-rigged model before. So, masking, grouping and using the transpose tool became my companion for the following weeks. Remodeling, tweaking, etc. As mentioned before, the method or lack of one, helped me destroy the wonderful, ordered mesh that I had, when I joined the hands to Spidude. (last image on the right on the top row) I had a lot of twisting in the mesh around the wrists therefore I had to zremesh the model. Like I said, I regret that I never added hands to Spidude, in the beginning. After the remesh, I lost the flow around the fingers. This made moving and shaping the fingers very difficult. The ends were chunky and jagged. I had to smooth and move the mesh continually. 

I stopped posing Spidude at the position as shown by the center line 2nd image from the left. I still needed to uv map him. I'm not sure whether I should have uv'd him in the T pose but from all the tweaking, I'm sure I would have ended up with a stretched uv map. 

I uv mapped him and applied a checked texture map to see if it looked workable. It did and I proceeded to pose him into his final pose.

After 3 weeks of mind-blowing modelling, I've reached the point of no return. I have learnt a great deal from this project and challenge. Thank you!

God bless you all and best of Hope in the challenge and beyond.

"Hey Absolem, DUDE! Where are you? I'm fly fishing at the lake already!"

Great work. He's got plenty of hands that come in handy.  

Thumbnail for contest gallery

Fantastic creation, very original. 

The Amazing Spidude.
Reminds me of the game where you can run around and take selfies, this dude could have 8 phones at once

Ooh 4 player co-op shouldn't be a issue either lol, 8 hands 4 controllers lol.

Well done on your modelling Dwint, best of luck, you've done a awesome job

Creative and fun idea. I like him chilling cool in his web hammock. x3