Grace-E Armstrong : November 2015

For this project i am supposed to make an item of my choice into a high poly model. The poly count can be ignored for the time being and i just have to make it as detailed as i can. My choice was to make a violin at first but then choose to make an Electric one as the are more variants of them.

i created this mood-board to as a reference guide. Below are images of the process that i have done.

i have a three view of the style of Violin that i want to make and started to build off there, i used the curve tool to follow along the body to make the shape that i needed.

after duplicating and making the outer walls of the body i began to fill in the gaps of the faces. but once i did the other walls that i created for the inside are the amount of faces and edge loops did not match. this was easily fixed when i deleted all edged and then used the insert multi edge loop tool to make even gaps.

The Body of the violin at low and high poly;

after the body i moved on to the neck of the violin, i used curves again to make the building process easier. and as i filled in the faces once i got to the head i realized that it would be too difficult to make the grooves in the head.

at this stage i deleted the head and chose to extrude faces out and move them so that i can resize and shape later on using the spiral.

the tricky part was getting rid of any triangles. once i created a circle to make the fished flat point i wanted to make it completely have squares and rectangles. i used another cylinder to make a ring and then matched it to the edges to make sure that it is circular. then i bridged across to make the circle using squares to remove the use of triangles.

next was curving the neck underneath.

i began to make the head seem more as if it had the carved wood on the head. mostly done by moving verts using the scale tool in one direction as to make it symmetrical.

next stage is making the indent for the area where the pegs and strings go.

done by extruding faces inwards.

and then the lip and raise on the head.

and next was the peg holes and shaping the head to make it smoother.

i added the fingerboard next which was just one cube that i shaped into place.

Another low and high poly stage images;

next is the saddle and tail piece. the saddle is underneath the tail piece at the base of the violin and hooks the tail piece so that tension can be made on the strings.

the saddle was made by creating a sphere and deleting half of it. i made it slightly flatter and created a ripple and then too the open edge, extruded and made it seem like a peg.

the tail piece started off as a cube then i added edge loops and created the areas where the hole are.

the next stage where i am at is to make the bridge.

I used curves again to make the shape that i wanted and once the basic shape was laid out i moved it around to get the correct shape.

i used the same process to make the faces that i did on the violins body. i created bridges being careful to not make any triangles. shaped it a bit and moved it in place.

the strings and pegs are what needs to be done next;

All the components are done now and i need to increase the poly count the images below are the close ups of the finished high poly in Maya.

The next stage was importing the model into Zbrush. this is done to increase the ploy could to make it a High Poly Asset.

Each area that is coloured is a different material. What i am thinking of going for is a metalic version of an electric violin, with simple plastics for the the rest so that the body would stand out more.

Applying a texture and crating normal maps is the next stage.