When you want to save your reference or texture images to your project folder you want to make sure you save them to your sourceImages folder instead of your images folder since the images folder is where Maya saves its rendered images when doing a batch render. You may find that you need additional reference material for finer details such as the hands. You may have noticed that for the side profile I didn’t bother to draw the arm since most of the detail would be lost, not to mention it is not really necessary to model the arm from the side view. I based my model on a character that appeared in a manga that I read online called Flower Flower and used various images from that manga as reference material. The following images are a front and side profile of a character that I created using only Adobe Illustrator’s pen tool and built-in rulers. If you already have a character in mind that someone has already created plenty of reference material for you to use it may not be as difficult as you think to modify the image into a T-pose. This may seem like a high hurdle for those of you who lack artistic talent, but don’t panic because I myself am not artistically inclined either. For bipedal characters it is generally preferred to model your character starting in the T-pose and to import image planes featuring at least the front and side profiles of your character.

The first thing any good modeler needs to get started is some reference material of what they want their character to look like from various angles. It may not look like it but this was the first time creating a character model and animation in Maya, which is why I would to give out some tips on how to avoid some of the same beginner mistakes that I made when working on this project.

For the remainder of this post I would like to give out some tips to anyone wishing to create similar works in Maya.

Maya character modeling