i wish to know how to maintain proportions for standardized modular elements that can integrate with one another.
my project is robot characters,specifically a personal take on lego’s Bionicle characters.
if you are unfamiliar with bionicle the toys were heavily modular with armor going upon bones and their most prominent feature are the wide variety of collectable “masks of power”.
i plan on making my own masks of power that either fit on the toy’s original head or my own redesigned head. but bottom line i want to make sure that whatever head i use the masks i design will always fit the base head.
i originally planned on modeling the head and other base structures first and then using the 3d app’s snapshot feature to make ortho templates i can sketch upon and basically replace the original ortho templates with the new ones having each new sketched/designed element be in place so i can model in place.
the problem is to keep the ortho snapshots at a 1;1 scale with the model so i don’t have to fiddle about resizing each time i open up the project .
and maybe have a system where i can break the whole image into higher res elements.
for example the masks of power would be more ornate and complex compared to the rest of the armor so i would want to render out a higher res head to sketch on,but i can easily scale down after to fit it on the rest of the body,if i am making sense.
i figure that cad software like solidworks and such have such features built in but i use a mac and there is limited cad software for it,good software anyway.
i currently use maya for my hard surface and low poly modeling with zbrush for all my sculpting needs as well as cinema 4d on occasion for spline/nurb work.
i personally wanna generate my snapshots in cinema4d as i hear they have a toon shader which can be exported as illustrator files in which i have full control over the linework letting the line sbe a constant width like a technical drawing.