This is a Hoth Rebel Soldier which I started building while bored one
night.  I was looking around my desk for something challenging and
different to build and came across a Kenner action figure that a good
friend gave to me.  It seemed a viable project, so a few hours later I had
already completed the head, torso, and arms.  Pleased with the results, I
spent a few hours finishing it up over the following week.  Unfortunately,
it's not to the detail that I had set out to accomplish, for a couple of
reasons.  First, I do not have a lot of spare time and really wanted to
finish the model.  Secondly, the animation that I decided to make, did not
require a high level of detail.  The difference in detail is extremely
apparent when comparing the upper body and legs of the model.  Perhaps in
the future I will refine the model to a better quality.

About myself:
I live in Valencia, California near LA and work at Four Media Company (4MC)
in the DVD graphics department.  I started off using Truespace 2 until
around six months ago when I had the great opportunity to get a copy of
Lightwave.

About the model:
Used the resent Kenner Hoth Rebel Soldier action figure for reference.  It
is always easier to model with the actual object in hand, but in this case
the object is not a true representation of the real thing.  Due to this
fact, the model may not be totally true in dimension, color, or detail.
Most of the body has textures, the remaining will be submitted later if I
have the time to complete them.  When modeling, I always try to keep a low
polygon count and use as few textures as possible.  This is a fine line, do
you sacrifice detail for speed?  A few tricks that I've found are to re-use
textures.  If planned right, a single texture can be used many times in
many ways on the same model.  This not only reduces file size, but the
rendering program will have fewer images to load and in-turn render faster.
Stay clear of tripling polygons if possible.  Tripling increases render
time significantly and really only needs to be used in trouble areas and
sections which will be morphed or bent during animation.

Original Platform : Lightwave 5.5
Converter : NuGraf Rendering System
Reference : Kenner action figure
Texture Software : Photoshop 4.0
Modeling Time : apx. 12hrs.


Tom Sehenuk
tsehenuk@4mc.com