Making the head of the Moria Orc
Well, this is how I made the head for my Moria orc.
As with any project, I started off by getting loads of reference. I was originally going to make an Isengard orc, but in the end rather decided to go with a Moria orc simply because the Moria ones look a little grosser!
So I captured tons of frames from my Lord Of The Rings DVD and used these not only as a modelling reference, but also to grab colours and get an idea of what sort of qualities their skin has. However, because all the orcs we see in the Fellowship Of The Ring are, in fact, people dressed up in orc suits, it was a bit difficult to rely completely on these for texture reference, since the heads we are seeing in the film are actually just latex masks, although they are very well made ones. So I improvised a little here and there ;)
I started out modelling the areas around the eyes and worked outwards from that point. I always prefer to model "detail out" so this is what I did. I model poly-by-poly in Lightwave Modeler, constructing at first only the one half of the face and then mirroring it, and making changes to each half so that the head is not perfectly symmetrical.
When modelling, I use the Pozextender script (by David Ikeda) as well as Lightwaves Bandsaw tool. I generally don't use many other tools apart from these and the Create Points and Create Polygon commands.
O nce I started adding the rings, I went back to the flesh in those areas and worked into them a little to give the effect of the piercings really digging into the flesh.
I wanted the eyes to look pretty creepy and real, so I modelled the actual eyeball seperate from the lens part. This is the best way to model eyes, as this is how our own eyes are constructed. Modelling the lens seperately and then giving it an appropriate glasslike surface creates a really cool looking eye with a realistic sense of depth.
Look at the image below to see the model, showing the seperate eyeball and lens (OpenGL screencapture from Modeler)
The teeth started out as normal teeth, which I then placed properly, and then just randomly pushed and pulled around to make them become jagged and viscious looking.
There isn't much more I can really say about the modelling part, so let's go straight ahead to the texturing part.
