Week 5

After completing the head I decided to start work on the characters body using a single square to start the body I then adjusted the vertices to get a more prism like body so that when smoothed the penguin would be round. From this square I then extruded the lower portion of the body with the edit poly and polygon function until I was satisfied with the height of the actual penguin. From this I then bevelled in the penguins lower part to create a kind of waist/hip area that the legs could be attached to or extruded from.
For the arms I selected some polygons from the side of the penguin and extruded them to make an arm which could reach down to where I hoped the penguin’s leg for later use. The arms like the rest of the body would require a turbo smooth to be more wing/arm like.
I added some simple legs to get an overall assessment of the body but created simple feet which could be improved for later use.

Week 4

With the head modelled I then modelled a pair of eyes and imported them into the scene. With he eyes imported in I then tried to adjust the vertices in the head to give the eyes more of a look that they were in the head instead of an unnatural look, I had to also rotate the eyes so that they could face forward but also keep them to the side of the head like a normal penguin but have them enough facing forward that the character looks normal.

With the eyes in a relatively good position I then added a simple black/charcoal texture over the head and beak, with the beak though I also added an orange stripe along the joining parts of the upper and lower beak by using a sub material with the black of the beak.
With the textures in the head and beak I then began to attempt to move the beak using a skin modifier and a set of bones to attempt to move the beak parts up and down and check for any errors with the way I had set out and created the head, fortunately I found no problems and as I predicted did not get any skin pinches or problems when moving the beak.

Week 3

To do the beak tip I converted the beak into an editable poly and extruded the edges of the beak to create a pointed tip for each part, I did this because a normal cone would look too straight and a penguin beak is somewhat curved which adds more of a natural element to its well as allowing me to move the edges so that the beak tip contained a bit of a bump like the penguin I used to map from.

Week 2

To get the general shape of the penguins head I began by adding a picture of a front and side facing penguin to two different planes and attempted to mould the objects used to create the head to fit these much like topology but instead of using quads using the existing object and using editable poly with adjusting the vertices for the shape.

Using a sphere and a cone I could easily create a head and beak which could then have the vertices moved so that they were more attached then a completely curved cone into one that was not completely round but fit the penguins head so that it did not look unnatural.