I had this idea to model an ornate walking cane, with a carved handle.  I thought about incorporating a gargoyle head, or some kind of similar creature, to the handle.  Thought it would be good practice to use profile modeling to quickly flesh out the shape.  I don't have any reference material, jsut an image in my head I wanted to get out.

It won't be animated, so flow isn't extremly important here, but it will use subdivision for smoothing, so I'd like to keep it all quads.  I'm using a nice little script plugin here, to quickly draw poly strips in the viewport for laying out the profile, and see what I get.

I always start faces or heads with the eye area, and work my way out from there.  So, I started by drawing a ring of polys in the viewport here, and just gave it a little shape with soft selection.

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Again, I have the vision of this bird-like gargoyle creature with it's mouth open, so I'll draw a strip of polys in the profile shape of it's "beak" or mouth.

I'm only doing half of it, and then symmetry will take care of the rest.

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Now, to get a better idea of the shape of the head, I'll draw the "border" strip of polys that will be the symmetry line.  So the left side is what I'll work on, the symmetry will mirror it to the other side, and weld the center seam.

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Here it is from the side view.  These are just single-sided poly strips right now.  Looks a little like a bird gargoyle already, but I'll use some soft selection tools just to tweak the shape later anyway.  This is just the rough block-out right now.  

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I wanna be sure I'm using all even number of polygons in my strips, so that I can fill and bridge them together without any tris.  I had an uneven number, so I just removed an edge in one of the strips, and used a "poly fill" tool to fill in some of the border edges. Used a little soft-selection to tweak the shape a bit.  So far, so good.

I only had a rough idea of this creature to begin with, and it's only going to be an ornamental part of a hard-surface object (walking cane), so I'm not concerned with edge loop flow.  Only the fact I want all quads, and a logical topology here.

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Using "edge extention", I simply pulled out more quads here from the border edges I already had, and tweaked the shape from different angles.  I'm not too worried at this point about the shape, because once I have all the surface filled in, I'll just use soft select tools to tweak the shape very quickly anyway.  So far, I'm just worries I'll run into some poly flow that won't line up into quads, but since I used all even numbers of polys in my profile strips, I'm not having an issue.

Ok, now it's looking like one of those creepy masks with the long noses.  But that's what I had in mind anyway, so I like that.

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Here it is from the front.

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I bridged the profile polys, and quad-capped the final hole.  A little tweaking of the shape, and relaxing of polys, and I have a nearly complete head shape already.  I'm picturing horns on the top of it's head, so I'll have to leave a hole in the top to extrude those.

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A few tweaks to the shape, and this is the result so far, side profile.

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Testing symmetry here.  Looks good so far.

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I'll eventually remove that middle edge loop that the symmetry modifier adds when it welds to two sides together.  I'm going to extrude some horns from the border edges of those holes in the top next.  However, I'm not set on what kind of horns I really want.

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Ok, just extruded "temporary" horns here.  I don't think I'll keep these in the end, or perhaps I'll modifiy them somehow, but these are good enough just for really quick standins.  This is still showing symmetry enabled.  I'm still only working on the one side.

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Here's screenshot from another angle.  I'll have to think about how to extrude the handle from here, but shouldn't be an issue since it's all quads.

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Screenshot here shows the extra details.  I filled in the eyehole with quads, then just beveled a makeshift eyeball structure from the polys in there.  This will be subdivided, so it will be smoothed out nicely.

I quad-capped the inside of the mouth here, and just extruded a tongue from some of the polys.  Some soft selection tweaking to rough out the shape a littl more, and relaxed some of the verts here, to regularize the distribution of edges.

This is where I'm at right now.  So I'm thinking about the shape of the handle, and how I'll incorporate this into it.  I've looked at walking canes online, and most of the handles are contoured to fit the hand in a particular way.  I'm going to just extend some polys out of the back of this head, and extrude the shape of the handle from there.

I'm about half an hour in modeling at this point.

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So here I deleted a few polys on the back of the head, and extended the border edges out with new rings of polygons, then just tweaked the shape a bit.  This will allow me to transition right into the shape of the handle I want to make.  It's just a simple matter here of creating a spline in the shape I want the handle, and extruding the border edges along that spline.  This should provide a smooth transition from the head into the handle.

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So here's the handle, extruded from the head as one geometry.  Now I just need to extend some of the bottom polys into the actual cane body.  This is slightly more tricky, because there's a shape transition of polygons that needs to blend smoothly.  The handle, obviously, is oblong, and not round.  The cane itself will be almost circular in its profile shape.  So, just need to make a clean blend of polys where the handle meets the cane body, and this model will be ready for finer detailing, and eventually, unwrapping.

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So here's the transitional polys now.  This is the entire handle, which will extend into the cane body.  The cane itself is obviously just going to be a simple cylinder shape, except the bottom will have some detail.  So that's it for now.  My next step is considering what I want to do with those horns, and create something a little more detailed in that area.  I'll post more screenshots later.

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Here's the preliminary test with SubD smoothing enabled; one single iteration.  I added two support loops to the base of the handle for a sharper edge there, and I may add some chamfering or bevels on the handle part itself, to give it a crisp edge.  The base object is currently at a reasonable 1,186 quad polygons.  Not bad so far.

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wow, thank you for sharing this.  It is so helpful to see the process, your end work is amazing.  Seeing the process makes it so much more understandable.

I like this Lux, the ones I've seen have a brass junction piece then the end of each ( cane and carved bit) are cut/shaped to fit.

**Xerxes0002**, thank you very much! I appreciate any and all input. Glad you found it interesting so far. Hopefully, you will also like the end result.

airflamesred, that's a good bit of info.  I really didn't find many close shots of the junction point between the cane and handle, and I don't have any in on hand to look at, so I was kind of "winging it" based on some reference material I found.  That's helpful info, and I'm going to use it to come up with something better for that area.

Tonight, I'm starting out by removing the old horns, and adding new ones with more detail.  The above image shows my process for this step.  After deleting the horn, I simply capped the remaining hole with an Ngon temporarily, and used a tool that made it as perfectly round as possible.  Next, I'm going to use a special extrusion tool to extrude some longer, "curved" horns.  The tool I plan to use here is kind of unique to my modeling package, but I might show what it does in the next screencap, because it's pretty cool.

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So here's the extrusion tool I was referring to, in progress.  What you are looking at here is the control panel for the extrusion operation on the right, and some "helper" objects, which are automatically attached to a spline, along which the extruded polygons follow.  These helper objects act like rigging controls for the extruded polys, and by manipulating their position in the viewport, I'm able to change the shape of my extruded polygons any way I like.  Once I'm satisfied I have the extrusion shape I'm after, I can commit to the operation, and lock in my results.  It's useful for things like horns, because as you're extruding and shaping the extrusion, you can also specify twist values and taper radius, to create some interesting effects in the mesh.

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This is the resulting extrusion.  Notice the edges are already twisted for me here, as a result of the twist parameter in the extrusion tool.  Selecting only those edge loops, I can now add a small chamfer value, which should provide the kind of "twisted goat horn" look I'm going for, once I add the subD smoothing.

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Here's the subD smoothed version.

I like the horns at this point.  Tomorrow, I'll finish this model by adding some more detail to the eyes, and then the transitional area between the handle and cane, as airflames suggested, and begin the unwrapping.  Should be fun.

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I like the longer horns much better.  This is a revealing thread.  I haven't seen someone model organics using polygon by polygon techniques like this in a while, except when retopologizing something.  I  thought it would be a much slower practice, but it looks like max has some useful features for this kind of modelling.  In Cinema, I would have gone with hacking it out from a box with subdivision and bevel, but I can see some advantages to this technique.  I've never seen an extrude feature like that before.  I admit that looks surprisingly interesting.  Let's see some more.

Ah the angry snail! Looking forward to the render.

Today I've added support loops to various edges, to sharpen them up a little, and tweaked the eye shape a bit (more round).

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...

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Added some more edge loops to provide sharper edges to the handle.  Had to spin some edges and do some manual tweaking to keep quad topology.  We're still at all quads.

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Here's how it looks with smoothing, 1 iteration of subD.

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Ouah! Thank you to show your skills. I love the character you imagined for this model, so quickly. I pull new polygons from the edges also. I can follow your guidance to the point of extrude, then different to make horns. The twist is not so automatique in Blender.

I'm working on the junction point now, where the handle will meet the cane shaft.  Since there's a shape transition that occurs there, I have two choices on how to handle this part.  As Airflamesred had pointed out on the previous page, these canes usually have a brass or metal "fitting" that joins the handle to the shaft, and the shaft of the cane is shaped at the tip, to conform to the fitting.  I could approach this fitting as a separate bit of geometry, like a tube primitive, and just model the shaft as still another object, like a cylinder.  In this model, however, I want to model all the parts as one object, then break it up for easier texturing later. So at this point, it's a good idea to weld the symmetry line, and work as a single object.

What I've done here is simply extend the border edge loop of the handle out along the XY coordinates, then use a "circularize" command to make them into a circle.  This will begin the brass fitting that connects the handle to the shaft of the cane.

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Then I simply extend that loop down, creating a new ring of polys.

Then from underneath, I inset that border edge loop, to finish off the part that is to become the metal fitting.

Lastly, I extend that same border edge straight down, to pull out a cylinder of polygons that will be the shaft of the cane.

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Depending on how long I want my cane, I'll just pull that edge loop all the way to the exact height I need my cane.  In this case, I'm thinking I'll make the cane 37 inches, which should suit a person between 72 and 75 inches tall.

Does anyone know the average height of a character in Poser?  I'm sure this item will see the most use from people using that application, so I'd like to model it to work with the models there.  If anyone can provide that information, it would be most helpful in designing this model.  Thanks!

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I measured the length of my cane to 92.7 centimeters, which is about 36.5 inches; around the proper cane height for a person 6 foot tall.

The bottom of the cane has a brass/metal collar and rubber tip.  So, I modeled these in, using edge loops, and beveling...

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I added support loops, and beveled all the hard edges.  At this point, the model is ready for unwrapping.  I'll break it into several parts before I unwrap.  I'll post shots of the production renders once texturing is complete, but first I'm going to add more small details.  Thanks for the input, guys.

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The object is now UV mapped.  Working on the textures.  The shaft is going to be wood.  Here's a screen cap.

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Here's a preliminary, real-time preview render of the procedural metal I'm working on for the handle.  This is only the handle, obviously, as the horns and other metal parts are separate objects now, but they will be textured the same.

Notice the very tiny scratches on the surface here.  The metal can be whatever procedural metal material the user desires to use for this in their own software application, but the maps for imperfections (bump, specular, diffuse, and glossy) will be included with the model for users to create the same effect seen here.

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Here's a realtime shot of the horns; same material, custom maps.  These maps will be tweaked further before distribution.

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Oh yeah!

Awesome...many thanks for sharing and posting this....

Swoit, moit!  I'm impressed by the results.  You should consider making video presentations of your modelling.  I never use edge modelling techniques, but this has given me good reason to try it.

Quote - Swoit, moit!  I'm impressed by the results.  You should consider making video presentations of your modelling.  I never use edge modelling techniques, but this has given me good reason to try it.

I certainly don't use this method for every model, but I find it very efficient for when I'm attacking some more complex geometry, which might blend hard and organic shapes in a particular way.

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Quote - Does anyone know the average height of a character in Poser?  I'm sure this item will see the most use from people using that application, so I'd like to model it to work with the models there.  If anyone can provide that information, it would be most helpful in designing this model.  Thanks!

Probably too late for this now, mate.  I have an older verison of Poser on my system.  I think it's Poser 6?  I just did a search in the Poser forum for this answer, but didn't find anything useful.  I think Poser uses inches to measure units, but users can change that.

There's some interesting threads in the Poser forum.  That software is so far behind the industry standards in rendering, it isn't even funny.  I wouldn't worry much about modelling your models for that software.  Users can just rescale it in there if they want to use it bad enough.

I nearly forgot about this model.  It's completed.  I've gone and finished the production preview renders that I will use when redistributing the object.  I'll upload it to freestuff sometime today.  Here's the preview renders...

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Thank you for taking on the journy of this model.  It was insightful and helpful, also for such a beautiful endproduct.

 

The skyshop, do you use that just to test out what it looks like in HDR (I found the website it says its image based lighting for unity.)  Just trying to see how you use it in context with this workflow.

Quote - Thank you for taking on the journy of this model.  It was insightful and helpful, also for such a beautiful endproduct.  The skyshop, do you use that just to test out what it looks like in HDR (I found the website it says its image based lighting for unity.)  Just trying to see how you use it in context with this workflow.

Hil  Thank you for commenting.  I'm using dDO, which comes with Marmoset Skyshop, to help automate small details in my texture maps.  It's great for generating small scratches, imperfections, and detail maps.  I use the Skyshop only as a way to previsualize how the texture maps might look with proper materials and lighting.  Since it's real-time, it provides instant feedback and results.  It's not nearly as accurate as a full production render, but it gives an excellent idea of how things will look.  It helps also to provide a quick way to preview the topology, and find any imperfect smoothing or areas in the mesh I might want to fix last minute.  Global illumination with HDR is great at exposing mesh errors and topology issues.

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This is so inspiring! Thanks for sharing, I learned a lot from seeing your work flow.

Quote - This is so inspiring! Thanks for sharing, I learned a lot from seeing your work flow.

That's great!  Thank you.

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