Creation

Creation of the Body

To begin with, I used a Plane vertically with a reference image of a Lego man on, I used images from Google as I do not own any actual Lego men and did not know how soon I would be able to get hold on one and I wished to start work as soon as possible. I drew a Box the size of the body at the widest point and just used a random depth until I had my side view plane in place;















and as the body is a very simple shape, I simply used the vertex select option to just pull in the top corners to the same position as in the picture behind.So here we are to create Bruce, the Big, proud Lego man complete with ego. Bruce is to have big muscles and a big ego. here is the creation of his physical character:
















As you will be able from the screenshots, I used reference plates to get the size and proportions of a real Lego man, this was done by creating a place and adding a picture of a Lego man as a diffuse map. Becuase I do not own any Lego men, I used royalty free photos from Google Images. There were 2 perfect pictures that came up of the front view and the side view near enough perfectly lined up, these were good enough to use, so I placed them on the planes ready to start the creation of Bruce. As per above, I used a short cylinder to start creating the arm, I then rotated the cylinder downwards and scaled it to what length I thought it should be, as all Lego men arms are bent by default, it wasn't a straight forward task to just copy the length:















I then used the slice tool to mark where I wanted to cut it with a nice angle to represent the bend in the arm













I then applied the slice modifier to achieve this result:













and then cloned that part to form the rest of the arm:













It was simply a case then of placing the arm in the exact position to seamlessly attach it to the other part of them arm, this was not an easy challenge trying to get it to look natural (using both views to position it):







































Once the arm was in position it was simply a matter of attaching the vertices













Here the arm is looking a little unnatural, so some adjustments are needed













Deleted some extra unnecessary edges that were placed there making the arm look odd so that I could add some extra ones in


























Adjusting individual vertices:













Next I wanted to add in some extra edges so that I could define the elbow and the inner crease of the elbow some more, this was achived by selecting the edges around the arm and using the 'Connect' button:













After doing the same again:













Adding more edges in:













Using the scale tool with the new edges selected gives the outer and inner elbow a rounder shape to it:













As we can see the arm is starting to come into shaper with Bruce's muscles starting to bulge, I wanted to get a fairly accurate representation of a bulging arm so I used another plane with a reference photo to imitate the shape:














The picture came on the wrong way round so I simply rotated it until it was the correct angle to work with the arm:


























Here is there arm attached to the body and some turbosmooth added as well





























Here I chose to give Bruce some rippling muscles for his chest and Stomach as he is a builder and very physically fit, I highlighted the polygons in the center of his stomach to represent a toned stomach:















Here was the result with the same method applied to the chest (however its not that clear here because its only a see through mesh):