A few weeks back I contacted Glen with a view to potentially having some one on one Silo training – well today I did just that. I went to Glen’s home studio in Cheshire and spent the day getting to grips with Silo and looking at some of the issues I have when character modelling.
Glen’s home studio is a really nice setup – I really need to get a space at home for this kind of thing. As I use a laptop I just tend to park up wherever I can and start working. Anyway, take a look at Glen’s studio…
We started the day running through the tools and just getting to grips with Silo before moving on to a model that I’ve struggled with a few times. I’m not going to post this one yet as I’m still working on it – however we followed that with looking at another character that I’ve struggled with in the past – Fry from Futurama. I’ve always had big problems with Fry’s upper lip, I just couldn’t get it looking right at all. Well we quickly solved that and even had time to throw together the rest of his body…
All the modelling was done by myself, albeit under Glen’s expert guidance.
Glen encouraged me to use reference material, not always but just to get more used to anatomy which I think is a good idea – he even gave me a moleskin notebook so that I can start sketching whenever I feel like it.
Just to consolidate my learning when I got home I wanted to have a quick play in Silo to make sure that what I’d learned was going to stick. I thought I would try and block out Moe from the Simpsons head and here is the result (modelled in Silo, rendered in Cheetah3d). It’s definitely a massive improvement on where I was prior to today…
I should probably point out that while today I was working exclusively in Silo, it wans’t really about the software – it was a lot more to do with modelling in general and approaches to it, the skills will be easily tranferrable to any other 3d modelling application.
All in all a good days training and I picked up a lot. If you’re interested in learning about modelling or sculpting I’d definitely recommend Glen. He makes a mean cup of tea too!