The Last Knight
My final project coming out of Gnomon and one of the most challenging by far.
(Play in full screen)
Concept by Wesley Burt
WIREFRAME
WORKFLOW
My hard surface workflow is pretty straight forward, block out simple primitives, look for interesting shapes before moving onto SUBD.
The biggest challenges were modelling things that I couldn't see in the concept, while keeping its spirit and trying to make it something I thought I would see in the Transformers Universe. A lot of the concept was loose which left me with the task of designing the back and figuring out the relationships between each piece.
This meant that I had to do a lot of experimentation; playing with shapes, jamming them together, seeing if they work, scrapping ideas, comparing new solutions to old solutions- as you can see... things get messy.
Organization is important! What works for me is having a 'WIP' group in my outliner which I can hide at any given moment with subgroups of each thing I'm working on (don't forget to delete history often, if somethings gonna break it will break).
You can also use Display Layers to organize your scene. I like to have a 'SUBD' Display Layer whenever I'm going through and making my pieces SUBD.
I also like to set up temporary hierarchies with locators and nulls so that I can pose the character and check if for clipping or general range of motion. Here's a quick example of how I generally set up these temporary hierarchies:
I try to keep my UVs symmetrical any chance I get. Once I have my UDIMs laid out I threw it over to Substance to texture. Then I bring it back to Maya to Render with the final comp being in Nuke.
And of course, always model with scale in mind.