Lisa graciously took the time to build a tutorial outlining the steps she had taken.

Modelling Sergio

1. Loft Modeling the body
After setting up the front and side image planes I establish the design’s cross sections with nurbs circles. The character’s limbs should be built in a straight pose to make toon rigging easier. I want this mesh to be high poly enough to appear smooth so for the body I’ll use 20 point circles and 8 point circles for the arm and leg. Make sure you work from one end of the torso/arm/leg to the other as you duplicate and manipulate each circle, otherwise the loft won’t work properly.

Once you’ve finished positioning all the circles for the body, arm and leg, select all of the circles for the body and go to surfaces> loft and open the settings box at its right. Your settings should look like the ones below:

Now hit loft. Select the new poly mesh and put it on a reference layer so it’s unselectable. Now you can further fine tune the positioning of your mesh’s crossections by adjusting the circles. When happy with the way it matches the image planes, delete history on the mesh. Repeat the process for the arm and leg.

Delete half the body as well as some polys around where the arm and leg should join.

Make sure history is deleted on all 3 pieces of geometry and combine them into one then merge the verts to joint the arms and legs to the body.

I like to use lattices to further refine the flow of the mesh, then add in more edge loops and details.

2. Box modeling the hands and feet
For the hand I start with the palm then make one finger and when happy with it I duplicate and manipulate it to make the other fingers. For the thumb, I also use a duplicate of the finger but I cut off more geometry and scale it up quite a bit more. Using a lattice deformer is also very helpful to get more of a thumb shape, then of course rotate it to the appropriate angle for a thumb and combine and attach all geometry.I didn’t save iterations of the foot as it is a very simple shape made from a box. Most importantly it must have enough geometry to bend at the ankle and toes.

3. Modeling the Head for a no-neck character
Cut off the head from the body and put it on a template or reference layer. This is so we don’t lose the tube like volume of the head while modeling. For successful facial animation, it is very important to create a topology with loops radiating out from the eyes and mouth.

I made the ears separately from a box then positioned it in the right spot to attach to the head mesh.

As for the areas of the head mesh that don’t have features on them, I tried to keep the original grid like mesh from the loft as much as I could while blending it into the edge loops that radiate out from the facial features.

For the hair I cut in the hair line with the split polygon tool then double edged it and extruded the bangs and wisps of hair. Once they were in the right place I added more geometry to them so they would appear smooth. I also extruded the visor and added lots of edge loops to it for animation.

*If I can’t think of the most logical way to construct my topology for any part of the model I draw it out first and if I’m not sure if it will deform well I quickly put some bones in and bind it to do a test.

4. Toony eyes
For the eyes I will actually direct you to a great tutorial by Javier Solsonas especially for cartoony eyes! See here.

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