Week 1

Week 1

 Alright, so pretty much I first started by creating a box and shaped it out with a broad top with a smaller bottom section. The reason being is that when I looked at how a centipede segment would look, I noticed that it had overlapping plates at the top to give it a protective shell.







Here is an example of that overlapping shell:

So here is that lip I had to make for the segment. The smaller back panel will be deleted and connected to a duplicate of the segment so that it will be a stream line of over lapping, connected plates that will move independently of the connection.









So the difficult thing for me here was trying to get that square yet round appearance. I saw several centipedes models had hexagonal plates or square plates, but looking at real centipedes, I noticed some had something that looked more like a scale of some sort in appearance, not really a bland shape, but one that flows in one direction when placed with others of its kind.

I had troubles trying to create that shape because no matter how much I tried, the corners looked way too sharp and square. I then began to pull at the back and front edges and it rounded out perfectly.

After getting the main body created, I ended up just extruding from it to create the legs. I had thought long and hard as to how I was going to make the legs, but I decided for animation purposes, it would be better to just extrude, leaving fewer complications with the mesh.

What I did with each leg segment was create two edge loops. One to hold the shape of the previous segment, and one to allow movement of the next segment. There is really no fluid bend like our elbow, it's just this mechanical change in position so I thing two edge loops will be fine. I also scaled the y axis of both loops of each segment, squishing it to give it a less cone appearance and more of a sort of insectoid shell.



I also have to make sure I have good, equal geometry, so including some edge loops along the legs will help prevent stretching when I apply textures.

Finally I have to UV the segment. Fortunately, I made sure there was an edge loop going around the middle, allowing me to planary map the y axis and splitting the segment in half horizantally.

I cut the UV edge and smoothed out the UVs, scaled them, flipped where appropriate, and then laid them out.
















Voila, a centipede segment! Next week, I will be deleting the front and back connections of the segment, duplicating it, and connecting them. My goal is to have the head and tail modeled by next Friday.