Prior to my employment in the motion capture lab at Carnegie Mellon University, a group from the mocap lab, including my mentor Jessica Hodgins, had traveled to Colorado to run a special capture of a group of dancers. It has been a few months since that trip and now that the chosen data has been cleaned and processed, we are currently working on creating animated models to send back to the dancers in Colorado. Although this project has been put on the backburner due to more immediately attention needing projects, I was able to begin my first human model. And to put it bluntly, this is no simple feat! As I am still learning the ropes of Maya, I did not know that the program allowed one to import outside pictures into the modeling space so that they could be used as a general guideline while you were creating the model. As a result, I began making the core of the model “from scratch” so to speak, simply building a model from memory and my slight understanding of the human body. To be honest, I do not believe it turned out too bad, considering that the only other real model that had made at that point was my blue bear. Once I was enlightened with the secret of creating more accurate models however, I used it to my advantage when creating the limbs of the figure. Once I had finished modeling all of the basic body parts, it was time to merge the pieces together. Sadly after doing this, some of the detail of my figure was lost. However it still can be recognized as a human figure so I suppose I can not complain. The image on this page are as much progress I was able to gain on the model before having to turn my attention to other projects. Hopefully after the mentorship is done, I will have more time and be able to go back and complete the model.