More modeling

I've been trying to figure out animating in Unreal and it's breaking my brain, so I need a break. Instead, I'm going to model a creature that will be easy to stumble upon early in the game, so I thought it might be interesting to show my process.

I've started with the humble cube, our morrowind mesh, and a reference drawing. The thing I'm modeling is going to be a big hulking monster, so I'm going to use this turnaround of a space marine in terminator (aka tactical dreadnought) armor from Warhammer 40k (credit to Ted Beargeon).

It looks like the easiest way to give our cube some shape is going to be by using the side view. I'm going to start by moving the faces of the cube to just encapsulate the space marine. Then, I'll add a few loop cuts, which will give me vertices that I can use to shape the cube and roughly outline the terminator's silhouette.

Since the apex of the terminator armor is a point, I need to merge some vertices on the top of my cube. I need to make sure that I don't merge all four of them into one point, however., so I'm going to step out of orthographic view and merge the pairs one at a time.

At this point, I've shaped the cube down to about the space marine's groin, so I'm going to stop here because I'm either going to make the legs out of separate meshes, or I'm going to need to be looking at a front or back view to start dealing with the fact that they're not connected past this point.

You probably know what's next at this point: loop cut down the center (sagittal plane), delete the vertices on one of the halves, add a mirror modifier.

Another thing I should mention, too, is that when you're starting out with your primitive, don't move it or manipulate it in Object mode. The first reason is that you'll move the object's origin. I think it's a good practice to have the origin always be at 0,0,0, so you know that when you add a mesh to Unreal that the bottom will always be at ground level. The other reason is that it will change the transform values, which isn't a huge deal because you can always apply them later, but it's one less thing to worry about when it comes time to setting up your export.

Anyways, here is our monster from the front view. I'm actually going to use the back view of the space marine, since it's a little easier to see what's going on. I'll at least rough out the shape now.

We're looking pretty good at this point; however, this is where I'd normally start using a top-down view to make everything look less like a block. I'll have to get creative and do my best. Also, his legs are looking a little bit too thick, so we'll scale those down. Since I can't get a top-down reference, I'll stop working in orthographic mode so I can see what sort of shape I'm creating as I go.

I've used a lot ofShift+Alt+S on him, which, thankfully, I was able to do because all the latitudinal lines I cut into him stayed nice and straight. With shade smooth on, he's looking pretty good. 

I think that what I'm going to do is take that vertex that's really protruding out the side of his abdomen and bevel it. Not an edge bevel, but a vertex bevel. Depending on how many segments you use, it turns a vertex into several faces. Here it is with just 1 segment:

Here it is with 2:

Since this is where his arm starts, I'm going to go with 1 segment. This square-shaped face will give me a better place to start.

[One hour later...]

Here's what our guy's base mesh looks like:

And here's what he looks like with a Subdivision Surface modifier with the Catmull-Clark setting on, plus a Simple one:

All in all, I'm pleased. Maybe next time we'll work on his head.