BARTZ: Part 1 Assessing the situation

Alright so here is the start of Bartz. I intend for this to be an informative journey, where both I learn and successors will also learn. After bringing the model into sketchup, the first thing I did was move the sword out of his hand, this way I can get a better look at what his hands doing.

 Now that I have the sword separated I want to inspect potential intersecting polygons.  This part is important!! If you don't look for these intersections then your model won't be positioned correctly, and pepakura will think that its OK to build the model even if these exist. I'm sure you can remedy these situations after you've built the model, but hey why not take care of them in the beginning.  As you can see in this next photo, the hand has some intersections and even what appears to be a gap. this will need to be fixed, otherwise when we build his hand it won't close just right.

 I continued searching for other intersecting polygons and found some others on his shoes.  These are minor and in the next post I'll show you how to fix some of these.  This one on the shoe probably doesn't even need to be fixed, its just that the tongue of his shoe will look poofy.  I mean I have an idea of how to fix it, I plan on using the "Move" tool and leaning the intersecting side forward a little bit, and then shifting the texture across the polygon to make it look good. But I have yet to try it, so we'll find out soon.

 This next picture shows where the boots meet the leg/calf.  This part is pretty important in my book.  It was the beginning of the downfall of my try at the Exdeath layout.  As the picture shows there is an intersection.  If you don't take care of it then your model will probably want to be leaning forward a lot because the polygon for the leg extends into the face of the top of the boot, in other words the rest of Bartz' leg is hidden inside the boot.  So if you don't fix this then your layout will include that extra length of leg and you won't be able to connect your model.  this problem can be fixed as well I'm not sure the best way, but I plan on doing it in a way that there is no ambiguity of which way the leg should face, and provide good structural stability.

 The last major intersection you'll notice is in the armpit.  I'm sure I'll still end up having to "squish" the armpits into place, but I'll try and take this on as well.  I'm not sure how other people feel but because its on the backside of the model most likely I'll just reduce the polygons in the back, and not worry if the texture looks too funny.  But I should try to make the entire model look as close to the original as possible, we'll see how difficult it becomes.

So this is the start of the Bartz model, based off of my experience thus far, and what Kaizo's videos have shown me, these are some of the problem areas you want to address when looking at your model in sketch up.  From here the next step is just to intersect the faces and delete the excess (Thanks ACE!!!).  That part can be kinda complicated if you're like me and not used to working in 3D, but its not that bad.