Mini Project - Pingu - modelling the characters

I set myself a mini project to recreate a scene from the animated series, 'Pingu', using concepts learnt in class. I'll add to/ change things in this scene as I gain more knowledge.

PINGU

Step 1: Set up reference images in the viewports.

The image below shows the background images I have assigned front and right viewports. I have turned the brightness of these images down (to 'fade' them) as I find it easier to see my wireframes on top.

Step 2: model a 'wing'.

I started by creating and resizing a cube to the rough dimensions of the wing, and moving it to the correct position. I then adjusted amount of segments along the legth to 5 (i wanted a low polygon count to avoid long render times later) and turned on 'fillet' in the cube properties to lose the sharp edges. I made the object editable, then repositioned vertices according to my reference images. The image below shows how my wing is positioned to the reference images.

step1 + step2.

Step3: apply a hypernurbs object
i applied a hypernurbs to the wing to see how it will look when 'smoothed'.

step3

Step 4: Model the body

The first step was to create a sphere and adjust the vertices to create the shape of the white 'inner' part of the body. This is a kind of egg shape.
To create the black 'outer' part of the body, I duplicated the 'inner body' and hid the original. I then selected the polygons that were in the area of the 'outer body', inverted the selection and deleted the uneeded polygons. I reposition the edge vertices to get a smoother shape to the edges. The outer body was given thickness by selecting all the polygons and extruding outwards.

Step 5: model the head

the head, eyes, pupils and beak are all spheres that have been scaled along the relevent axis (x,y and z) and moved to the rough positions in the reference images.

step 4 + step 5

Step 6: Model the feet

The feet are cubes with 3 depth and width segments, with the vertices positioned to the rough shape and size of the reference images.

The low-polygon model

I unhide all my parts when they are all modelled. The following image shows the low poly model without hypernurbs objects applied.

With hypernurbs applied

The hypernurbs is applied to all objects except the eyes and pupils

SEAL

I found an image of a still from an episode of Pingu. it shows some of the enviroment, Pingu and a seal. I dont know if the seal has a name so ill just call him 'seal'. I decide to create 'seal'. I used the following image as a reference.

Image from http://www.pingu.net/uk/

Seal Step 1: Body
I created a cube and positioned it to the neck/shoulder area using my reference image as a guide, i then extruded the bottom polygon downwards and repositioned/resized the extruded polygon to the right position for the next extrusion. I then repeated this process until i reached the tip of the tail. The tail fins were extruded from the sides of the tail.

Seal Step 2: Head
The head is simply a squashed sphere with the mouthparts created with 2 extrusions and repositioning/resizing of the polygons.

step 1 + 2

Seal Step 3: apply hypernurbs and readjust low poly model.
A very useful feature of the hypernurbs object is that you can work on a low polygon model whilst seeing the results with a high level mesh. In other words, i can work on the mesh in the image above while seeing the results as in the image below.

Step 3 seal step 4:

I merged this object with my 'pingu' model and copied the flippers from pingu, and repositioned/resized the copies to fit 'seal'. A small sphere was added to create the nose and the eyes were copied from my 'pingu' model.

step 6