Continuing from last week i welded the rest of the body parts together. this was a relatively easy process, which worked the same as welding the neck to the body. sometimes the insert vertex tool was used when extra joints were needed. welding does not work on closed faces so the capped faces on the arms and legs needed to be deleted before joining to the body.
one problem i found was some vertices would not weld. i found the solution to the problem here: http://www.gameartisans.org/forums/showthread.php?t=14071
the problem was caused by flipped polygons. these are shown darker red than the other faces when selected so it is generally easy to find which faces need to be flipped using the flip option in the polygon rollout. flipped faces do not render as they are backwards and therefore the normals are the wrong way round. this is another way of finding flipped polys, to do a quick render and see which areas don't show up.
when joining the legs i added a section at the groin area so the legs could move independently of each other. Paul Steed (2003) writes, "Never have the upper legs join in the groin area. keep a gap at the groin to ensure the legs will look right when they're in motion".
when attaching the shoulders i added extra edges around the shoulder area to stop the textures stretching when the arm moved. to add the edges the connect tool was used, by selecting two edges and pressing connect, which adds an edge between.
For the hands i imported the hand model from week 1 into the scene and attached it to the body. i then welded the arm and hand together. i used a symmetry modifier when i imported the hand and lined up both hands first, to save doing the same job twice. for this to work the modifier stack needs to be 'collapsed' after the hands have been mirrored correctly, so that the mirror is no longer in effect when the hands are connected to the body; if the modifier was still active the whole mesh would be mirrored again giving two bodies.
the hand was smoothed a lot so when i imported it i used an optimiser modifier to lower the poly count. this did the desired job but the hands will need edges added at the knuckles if they are to be animated.
i created the feet by box modelling as they only needed to be simple shapes.
the body mesh is now complete. here are some images from different angles:
this render of the mesh shows the smoothing groups at work.
the final step is to add the eyes and hair.
Game Artisans, 2010. Vertices that won't weld. [online] Available at: <http://www.gameartisans.org/forums/showthread.php?t=14071> [Accessed 3 March 2011].
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