Posted on October 5, 2014

Problem: Using all the techniques learned so far, model a Pixar character.

Solution: I decided to model the Little Green Men from Toy Story, originally taken from the Buzz Lightyear cartoon series. These seemed really simple because of the shape of their body but they had a lot of really small detailed and it was difficult to decide that it would be better to start with low or high geometry.

The most difficult part was that I could not find any side views of the character that I could use and thus had to use my imagination. So I started with a polygon cylinder with about 8 spans and shaped the body. Then I extruded the surfaces at the bottom to make the legs and shoes. It was very tricky to model the shoes as I had no idea what they looked like from behind.
Next I started to build the collar and inserted edge loops wherever necessary. Then I used an elongated sphere to make the head and then jointed the two together. This completed the basic structure of the body.

To make the eyes, after about an hour of trying out different techniques I ended up adding a bunch of edge loops and using the sculpt geometry tool. Although this did give me the correct shape but apparently the geometry still wasn’t enough to get the pupils round enough. For the antenna on his head I extruded the surfaces at the top of the sphere. Then, I used cylinders to build the arms and fingers and simply attached them to the body.

Building the ears took most of my time. Since I did not have a side view, I tried to use a cube with very less geometry and shaped it according to the front view. It took me 1-2 hours just to figure out the right size of cube and geometry to shape the ear.

Now that I have the model in front of me and it doesn’t anything close to the actual character I realize that I could’ve used a lot of different techniques to make the model look much better. Also, for some reason my model looks kinda square although I smoothed it.

The maya binary file is here.