Harrisonfog approached me with a fun idea for Jabbas palace in his remastered project, make Max Rebo to fit inside of the organ. The concept I was given was to make Max Rebo with his hands covering his face like he does in ROTJ.
So first I had to import our current model of the organ from SWBF2.
I placed a cylinder primitive inside of the organ. This will be where Max Rebo’s body starts.
Next I selected all of the polygon faces on the top side of the cylinder, duplicated them (ctrl+d) and translated them up, I then scaled them up to give this taper shape.
repeating that process of scaling, translating and duplicating only the top polygons of the cylinder, I did this 3 more times until I had this nice plump round ball like shape. This will be the base of his body.
The very top I scaled inwards a little more than the rest of the body, this is to eventually help the head and shoulder blend onto the body.
I created a cube primitive and positions it roughly to where I want the top of the head to be.
Next I simply duplicated and translated the back face of this cube along the Z and Y axis until I got this little curved shape (note at the very end of this I also dragged one of the edges to make a flat face 90 degrees from where I started.
after creating that 90 degree turn I continued to duplicated and translate until I had this nice tail shape for the back of the head
I then duplicated the side faces and translated them along the X axis to make 5 subdivisions, this will be used later to smooth out the back of this little head tail.
I dragged the points on the bottom of this shape to make roughly a cylinder like shape to help make the back of the head be more spherical by the end. this will be where that tail ends and meets the back.
next I dragged the very back faces of the polygons to be inside of the back.
I then selected the points of the polygons at the back of the tail and started translating them to create a smooth surface for the tail
repeating these steps I moved up the back of this polymesh and rounding the back until I felt it blended right.
I continued the smoothing process until I hit about this point, I want to leave this area as is for now so I can add the ears later.
next, similar to how I designed the back of the head, I duplicated and translated the faces on the front side of the cube to make approximately the shape of the forhead.
much similar to how the back of the head was designed I selected the points on the top of the forehead and began translating them until I got roughly a smooth surface for the forehead.
Once the forehead was smoothed I created a new cylinder primitive and placed it roughly where i think the arm should meet the bodys mesh.
I selected the side face of the cylinder, duplicated and translated it along the X axis several times until I got this shape on my cylinder. A break down of how this works is basically I create one set of subdivisions for the shoulder, two for the elbow, two for the hand and an extra set for where the fingers will meet.
Next I selected the points of the shoulder and dragged them inside of the bodys mesh to help visualize where the arm will meet the body.
I then scaled down the points where the elbow will be to help visualize where the arm will taper.
next same concept I scaled down the points for the hand to help visualize what the taper of the hand will look like.
Now with those tapers in place I simply have to take the other edges and points in the arm and translate them until my tapers blend with the arm.
next I created a new cylinder and selected its top face and duplicated it, translated it out, this will be a finger.
after creating the shape i wanted for the first finger I simply duplicated the finger model, translated, scaled and rotated it until I made the rough shape of the other 4 fingers.
with all the fingers in place I simply merged the 6 models together (arm and 5 fingers) this is so after I freeze the operator stack I can start welding the fingers to the arms.
After the fingers points where welded to the arms points you can see we are left with a much smoother shape.
with the arm complete I went back to the head and began dragging the 3 polygon faces on the bottom of where we left off with the forehead to make the trunk.
With this shape I began to first manipulate the points where the forehead ends to make a taper shape to the trunk.
Next I simply smoothed the polygons on the trunk to create a cylindrical shape.
then with the very bottom of the trunk I duplicated the bottom face of the trunk translated and scaled it down until I got this nice rounded bottom.
finally I selected all of the polygons in the middle of the trunk and scaled them down to give me a nice tapered appearance.
next for the ears I selected the polygons on the side of the head duplicated them and translated them out along the x axis.
I repeated this process 3 more times until i had the desired subdivisions for the ear.
next I simply selected the points on the outer edges of the ear and translated them along the X and Z axis until I had the approximate desired shape of the ear.
I then moves all the outer points closer together to make the outer edge of the ear thinner. I then started to drag each point until I had a nice smooth surface for the ears shape.
repeating these steps I created the other ear on the other side of the head. I then selected every poly on the “inside” of the model and deleted them (this is so i can properly weld the neck together)
to seal and create the remainder of the head and neck i simply selected the edges show above and dulpicated them and translated them to create more subdivisions.
with those subdivisions in place i simply welded the points from my newly created subdivisions to the top of the head.
repeating that with my remaining edges i created additional subdivisions for the neck and simply welded the points all together until my entire head model was one mesh.
Next i went back to the body model and used the add edge tool (default “\” key) to add edges around the neck pretty close to the head model but wasnt too worried about it being precise.
I then selected all the polygons inside those lines and deleted them to create this hole in my model (note what im about too do can be achieve through boolean union, but it doesnt always work so i like to do it manually on complex geometries)
I repeated this process around where the arms meet the body as well to create arm holes.
Next i simply merged my head, body and arm models into one mesh then started welding all the arm hole points to the arms and all the neck and head points to the head until the entire model was sealed.
and with all the points welding the model is complete. Now we want the arms to cover the eyes.
to accomplish this first i created a series of nulls as bones and set them as children of one another. I created seperate parent chains for the ears and arms.
As pictured here you can see the green lines are the nulls where my bones are placed.
next I simply enveloped my mesh to the bone nulls and prepared to turn some bones.
now I simply rotated and translate the bones (note i made an arm, forearm and hand bone) and moved the hands until they covered the eyes.
I then repeated this process with th other arm and hand until they were approximately where desired.
and finally i rotated the ears down until they rested on the shoulders.
finally with the model roughly where i want it to be I went edit > operator > freeze operator stack. this freezes the geometry in its current position and removes the envelope from the bones.
I duplicated the entire model after it was done to create a hi res model. at the back of the head i drew some edges with the add edge tool and translated their points outward to create some ridges.
on the fingers i simply created a greyscale bumpmap and applied it to the ip of the hi res models fingers.
for each of the fingers i drew an additional greyscale bumpmap to raise the details in the ridges of the fingers.
after all my fingers were in place i simply checked the render preview window to make sure my bump map looked alright.
I repeated this process and simply added some spots to the remainder of the hires model. After I was satisfied with this I simply opened ultimapper in XSI selected my hires model as my source and started baking a normal map and an ambient occlusion map.
after that was baked I simply chose a plain blue texture and applied my new normal map to the model in XSI. against that plain blue texture this is what it looked like. When complete I went into XSI Rendermap and rendered a new diffuse.
And with my new diffuse I created a material, and applied it to the model, I used render type 28, in texture 1 i put my newly baked normal, with texture 2 i put my AO map (darkned by 50%), exported and ingame, and this is how we look. I know the texturing section seems short but thats all there was too it, I made a blank texture with only blue, applied some normal maps, and let xsi do the rest. And thats it we have our new model :).
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Star Wars Battlefront 2 (Classic 2005) Modelling 