Making of Wolverine by vikramvr

Introduction

I wanted a completed next-gen model for my show reel, and Wolverine is my favourite comic book character. So, I decided to make a game model of him. I chose this outfit for him, because I felt that among the numerous wolverine models, already done out there, none that I know of has this outfit and in the movies or in the comics, wolverine is famous for his jacket and vest looks. So I decided to model him with his jacket.

Modeling

I initially wanted to model him in the proportions of Hugh Jackman like in this picture.

But then decided that, the comic book wolverine is a short stout guy, rather than having the proportions of Hugh Jackman. So I decided that my wolverine would have a combination of both real life and comic book characteristics.

I started constructing a rough head, all by extrudes. I created a plane and used extrudes to construct the head. I restricted the head to about 2300 tris, including the eyes. Since, we are not going to see the inside of the head; I removed the side of the sphere that is inside the head.

At this point I didn’t worry too much about the overall shape of the head, because I would be taking it to zbrush for detailing, and exporting a final low-res model (1 sub-d level) from zbrush.

I then modeled the body. Here’s a snap shot of wolverine without a jacket. I later constructed the jacket, by detaching the torso from the rest of the body, and pushed the vertices around so that, the jacket would fit over the body. Now I had two versions of him, one without the jacket, and one with the jacket. However I concentrated on the version with the jacket more.

I thank the wonderful artists at gameartisans.org for helping me out through the modeling process. A tutorial on mesh flow that I followed is at http://www.pig-brain.com/tut02/tut02_02.htm.