character: "Snow"

[theleast]

More work done. Main tasks now are to attach the neck and tweak everything. I'm not entirely happy with the hands at the moment, suggestions would be appreciated.
http://www.davidcsimon.com/pub/cgtalk/snowWIP4.jpg
http://www.davidcsimon.com/pub/cgtalk/snowWIP4b.jpg
http://www.davidcsimon.com/pub/cgtalk/snowWIP4c.jpg
http://www.davidcsimon.com/pub/cgtalk/snowWIP4bc.jpg

[Artician]

Connecting seperate parts is no big deal. Just be mindful of your vert-count around each edges circumfrence and you can snap them together fine. Working with seperated components makes things easier in the first place.

It looks like you've got a good start. There are a couple things that stand out to me at the moment, which are mainly the large, oddly shaped tri's and poly's in some areas of her body.
The ones along the front of her chest will make deformation a little bit difficult and UV's stretchy, so you should add a subdivision there when you can. Worse though are the long triangles on her hands, where the fingers meet the main body of her hand. Those are going to make some ugly disfigurations when you deform them, so I highly recommend making sure you have complete edge-loops through areas with funky poly's like that.

Having triangles isn't a bad thing, just watch out for the ones that are long or shaped strangely. It's a good start, and very low poly. I look forward to seeing more!

[theleast]

Thanks Artician, some helpful advice there. I've added several subdivs across the body, hands and face - is this looking more practical as an animatable character? I think I've stuffed up her nose.

http://www.davidcsimon.com/pub/cgtalk/snowWIP5.jpg
http://www.davidcsimon.com/pub/cgtalk/snowWIP5b.jpghttp://www.davidcsimon.com/pub/cgtalk/snowWIP5c.jpg

[Artician]

Looking good, but here's a couple quick edits on some things that stood out -

http://www.creathcarter.com/site_images/misc/snowEditA.jpg


The model itself is really good. The only issue that crops up for me is how straight-lined a lot of your polywork is. It's very mechanical, not organic the way you would expect a human to be. Try to achieve a smooth form across all of her anatomy. Really that's it. I really like where the rest of it is going.

I hope that helps some.

[theleast]

The model itself is really good. The only issue that crops up for me is how straight-lined a lot of your polywork is. It's very mechanical, not organic the way you would expect a human to be. Try to achieve a smooth form across all of her anatomy. Really that's it. I really like where the rest of it is going.

I hope that helps some.
Thanks Artician, very helpful indeed! I've made some changes based on your tips:
http://www.davidcsimon.com/pub/cgtalk/snowwip6.jpg
I still plan on tweaking the geometry a little further, but I think I'm nearing the end of this stage of modeling. However at the moment I'm not entirely sure in which order I should proceed. I plan on building a high-poly version so I can bake a normal map, but should I focus on texturing and rigging the low-poly version first, or is it better to leave that until the end? Or does it not matter?

Also, there are several parts of her body with overlapping parts (particularly her collar and dangling skirt thingies) - are they going to present a problem when baking textures?

[Artician]

You might want to take a look at her face before going further: less sharp polys, more organic mesh flow, and more consistency in mesh density. Don't add more polys if you can avoid it. Just adjust verts here and there. You could probably even get away with axing a few of those subdivisions from her nose, because it has an akward amount of strips in it.

Just a tip, if you're trying to keep her primarily quads, and you need to bring some together in the middle of a strip, here is a wonderful shape to get used to -

http://www.creathcarter.com/site_images/misc/snowCommentA.jpg

This is a nice way to draw quads together without resulting in a triangle. I only mention it because it makes it easier on you when importing into Zbrush/Mudbox.
Otherwise if your mesh has triangles you want to eliminate before sculpting, you can just run a smoothing algorithm on it and export that to sculpt from when it's time.

Last thing, I will generally lay out the UVs first (just to get it out of the way), and then export that model for the high-res sculpt. Then you can generate your normal map and ambient occlusion first. The Normal Map can guide where certain details are for your diffuse map, Ambient Occlusion gives you a head start on it.

[theleast]

Thanks Artician. As always, very helpful :)

Here's an update. There's still much to do, but she's starting to come together. Any tips on how to make her skin a little less plasticy? She's meant to be an android, but she's also meant to be able to pass herself off as human :)
http://www.davidcsimon.com/pub/cgtalk/snowWIP10collage.jpg

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