Character Creation - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 139

when animated and bent. Figure 6.14 shows several views of a model of an elbow joint. By now, you should
be able to see that it is mostly a series of loop cuts around the circumference of the arm. Notice how loops
are also in place that describe the area around the elbow and biceps. This is the main reason that I recom-
mend using a stock model for the human figure unless you are specifically attempting to model a person as
an educational exercise: The levels of detail, proportion, and mesh control that go into a successful model
are a complete topic and art unto themselves.
When modeling clothing though, you don't need to have this complex loop structure to get a realistic
deformation. As we'll see in Section 6.7 on adding clothes, cloth is more akin to a grid in 3D than any-
thing else. The only thing to really avoid is putting too little geometry into a joint like this—the outside
edge, like the elbow, will get “mushy” and flatten out when animated.
Hands and Other Exposed Parts
I'm about to give you the greatest advice you can receive in CG: cheat. Cheating is good. In fact, CG
itself is little more than a series of cheats. There's no real light. None of the objects we make have vol-
ume—they're just empty shells. Shading and surfacing are a compilation of dodges and approximations.
Did you know that in The Incredibles every single nonhero character (i.e., the cast of thousands of extras)
in the movie is a variation on the same base model? I say this so that when I make my statement you'll
remember that the character was modeled once, then used over and over again by the best people in the
business (and possibly the history of the business).
Here it is: Use someone else's hands. Sure, you can learn to make your own, but even if you do that,
you'll probably end up using that same hand over and over again. If you really want to see how to create
a hand from scratch, there's a video in the Web Bucket ( let_me_hand_it_to_you.mpeg ) of me doing that very
thing. I've included a low-resolution version of that hand in the file helping_hand.blend . You either duplicate
the file, open and start working with it, or Append it to your file like we did with the head. The object's
name within the file is “hand.”
While we're on the topic of using premade structures, let's take a look at two free programs that are a
source for human figures with great anatomy, MakeHuman and DAZ Studio. Both programs allow you
to adjust a basic body directly within their interface, then export the results as an OBJ file that Blender
will happily import. Personally, I don't feel like learning a whole new interface and find that Blender's
mesh editing tools are more than sufficient to the task, so I just export the OBJ straight away from both
programs. Then, I bring it into Blender and start editing.
Figure 6.15 shows MakeHuman, an open-source application available for Windows, Mac, and Linux at
http://www.makehuman.org . It's interface changes drastically with each Alpha release, so I'm loathe to give
step-by-step instructions on anything but a basic export.
The other free application that can generate people is DAZ Studio. It's not open source, but is extremely
popular. In fact, the DAZ community has a bunch of relatively inexpensive premodeled resources if you
should ever need such a thing. DAZ Studio can be slow, and its interface obtuse and frustrating, but if
you select the default human object and choose File > Export you can make an OBJ for Blender to