StarWars

The purpose of this tutorial is modeling a Walker in a better and faster way than people at ILM can, so you can steel their job, get George Lucas fired, and create new job postings in 3d productions houses...
Of course, the 3d model comes first.

we'll actually model two walkers with different level of details, one, very simple for fast animation, and one, very detailed, for final rendering.

Before we start modeling...
Just one stupid recommendation: make sure the two model look somehow alike. You cannot animate a biped and then final render a four legged walker...
Proportions should be coincident as well: for example the leg should be the same length in both models.
It's a good idea to start modeling the low detail model and then use it as a reference for the high detail.


Get an easy and rough sketch of what you're about to model, like the absolutely original one we have above.....


The feet...
Let's start modeling from the ground up.
the toes...
We choose Create Polygon Tool and draw the central toe profile in the side view. Enter when we've finished the shape. Now LMB and select Face from the pop up menu. The profile becomes active as a polygonal face..
Now let's extrude it. Polygon > Face Extrude to obtain something that should look alike the picture below.




Let's now make the toe empty by using the same technique. We turn around the view until we see the rear face of the polygonal toe. we select it as a face, as we did before, but now when we are in the extrude mode, we don't move it around like we did before but we use the scale manipulator instead and scale the face until we obtain a uniform profile. now let's select one more time the extrude function and move the face this time towards the inside part of the toe. Look at the picture below to have an idea of what you should have obtained out of your model.




Ok. Now let's work on the ankle.
Back to the side view, let's draw once again the ankle profile, like is shown in the picture below. Enter when you've finished.



As we did before, we extrude the profile to the correct depth.
And once again, lets make the polygon hollow by scaling and extrude the face towards the toe...



now let's select the toe's front face and move it forward to obtain a longer shape...



We duplicate the toe twice and rotate the new model 90 degrees left and right to obtain the two other toes.
Scale and modify the shape of the two side toes to match your original sketch.



Now the calf...
Same old technique. Switch to side view, draw the profile with Create Polygon Tool,
extrude it with Extrude (by the way, make sure you're using the extrude in the polygon menu..), and, if we wish, make it hollow once again.



Now we use a new one tool in order to divide the polygons, select therefore Divide Polygons Tool (Edit polygons > Split Polygons Tool for v.2) , we select the edge of the polygon that we want to divide and we draw a cut line.