I am following along, and now I can’t take it any more.
Can someone point me to a good place or places to get a crash course in the pro’s and cons of 3, 4 and 5 sided polys and a good explaination of edge looping?
I have been working with your basic “box model” workflow and just cutting and fusing polys as I felt like it and needed to. Obviously this will get me in a LOT of trouble 
Thanks!
This Saturday Im giving this class at school, I could send you what Im writing for the manual, but it’s Dutch and not finished… But basically. Edge Loops and placing your polygons is just an opinion… some are better some are not, but there is no real truth. You should alway work towards animation and texturing if you intend to do so. For mechanical objects you have to analyse the math behind it. And the best way to learn is change the loops untill it looks good and works good. Ill see what I get from my class Saturday, that might help some of us.
Originally posted by Soulhuntre
[B]I am following along, and now I can’t take it any more.Can someone point me to a good place or places to get a crash course in the pro’s and cons of 3, 4 and 5 sided polys and a good explaination of edge looping?
I have been working with your basic “box model” workflow and just cutting and fusing polys as I felt like it and needed to. Obviously this will get me in a LOT of trouble
Thanks! [/B]
I would love to show you some work I’ve done for a manuel tutoriual, on the subject, but it is Property of Sony Pictures Imageworks… I can tell you ow to resolve it for yourself however…
Make a plane and a half cylinder, adjust the topology so that it has a triangle to lower the resolution and one with a terminating edge as well… (terminating at a five sided polygon)… Then use smooth… this will show you what is going on with the resultant topology and you can follow the flow and understand (and predict whats going to happen in advance) Smooth isnt quite the same but it is useful in illustrating the flow and is close enough to help you understand. You should do the same tersts on the cylinder and the plane to see how a curved surface is influenced by the resolution change.
another good test is to see the diference between a five sided polygon with one of the corners having three feeding edges and one with 4 feeding edges on all corners.
All these things have implications for ease of rigging and best topology for shape…
To confirm… There are good reasons to use triangles and pentangles when they have suitable resultant topographical characteristics, it will help keep geometry light and purposefull, having less redundant edges.
…provided your pipeline can make use of them that is…
Rich
Originally posted by Rich Suchy
[B]…provided your pipeline can make use of them that is…Rich [/B]
That sentence above IS very important…:wip:
Where I work, 4-point polys are the ONLY polys the pipeline will support! :hmm:
Originally posted by roger
[B]That sentence above IS very important…:wip:Where I work, 4-point polys are the ONLY polys the pipeline will support! :hmm: [/B]
The good news is that one can always count on change… …if you wait long enough…
:hmm:
I agree with Derby and Rich. And I’d like to add:
The only real drawback to me would be the slight texture stretching that occurs sometimes. But firstly, human skin usually isn’t contrasty enough to show this (especially not women), and secondly, it can be fixed. As for pipelines, one extra subdivision at rendertime will make the surface all quads and it should work in any app.
I’m not avoiding edge-loops, to me they are still a valuable concept. I guess my method is a hybrid.
Some think I’m simply taking shortcuts, being lazy. On the contrary, a lot of thought went into every single polygon.
I need a light mesh, for my multitude of Blendshapes to not bog down, and to be easy to tweak. And at the moment it is - even light enough for me to make 20 extra Blendshapes of the whole body just to adjust the deforming of the fingers (for a total of nearly 60). Doing it all quads might nearly double the number of polygons I have to work with. That would probably mean more than twice as long spent creating morf targets, slower feedback and a bigger file.
Another thing people don’t like about my topologies is the random chaotic look - it seems ‘dirty’ to some. But this is exactly what is needed for human bodies - chaos. You want to avoid ‘clean’.
The default behaviour of any 3d program is smoothness, clean-ness, geometric simplicity. So models often look too regular, as if stylized on purpose, as if milled in a machine by some simplistic CAD program.
Flesh is never regular, it always curves in all directions and the curvature changes constantly. There aren’t 2 square inches on our bodies shaped exactly the same. There are no straight lines, no perfectly circular or elliptical arcs, no 90 degree corners…
This is so much easier to achieve, with triangles and 5gons, rather than with all square similar size quads. Try it, you’ll see what I mean.
Originally posted by Stahlberg
…The only real drawback to me would be the slight texture stretching that occurs sometimes. But firstly, human skin usually isn’t contrasty enough to show this… …secondly, it can be fixed. As for pipelines, one extra subdivision at rendertime will make the surface all quads and it should work in any app.
thats how you can get around the mental ray limitation in Maya…
[B]
Another thing people don’t like about my topologies is the random chaotic look - it seems ‘dirty’ to some. But this is exactly what is needed for human bodies - chaos. You want to avoid ‘clean’.
The default behaviour of any 3d program is smoothness, clean-ness, geometric simplicity. So models often look too regular, as if stylized on purpose, as if milled in a machine by some simplistic CAD program.
Flesh is never regular, it always curves in all directions and the curvature changes constantly. There aren’t 2 square inches on our bodies shaped exactly the same. There are no straight lines, no perfectly circular or elliptical arcs, no 90 degree corners…This is so much easier to achieve, with triangles and 5gons, rather than with all square similar size quads. Try it, you’ll see what I mean. [/B]
Whats going on is that you are ending up with edge loops that merge togather in smaller areas, in the end you always have edge loops, its just a matter of knowing how they will align once you subdivide.
As for chaos, skin slides over hard and soft forms (diferently…) and so really the mesh should not conform too perfectly to forms that it will not hold. Its better in those cases to have less specialized… for instance where the scapulat slides under the skin and the triangular hollw that forms as the lower corner of the scapula slides under the muscle that sheaths a good part of the back.
EDIT---- Addition
In the face the muscle and skin work togather better. The skin does less sliding and stays with the muscle closely.
Hi everybody,
Steven, I don´t think you are the creator of a method, just because I have been doing it for years, and I think a lot of people too.
It would be crazy if you shoud have to follow all the edges lines in a body character without being able to break them… if your application allows it. When you don´t need so much poligons you break an edge line, or by joining it to another one with a triangle, or by breaking it by a five sided. For me, and for a lot of people it´s just an obvious thing.
Thanks for your kind words about my deformations. I prefer crits, but it´s ok.
EDGE LOOPING: I have never been taught 3d and never heard of this before reading this thread. But what it seems they mean by “edge looping” is the way smooth or subdivision modifiers behave when you apply them on a wireframe: it loops or curves following the edges lines.
For example, when you make the upper lip you draw a line of edges to define the upper line of the lip. That way when smooth is applied it smooths following that line.
edge looping is a conceptual idea more than anything. It’s more about how you group geometry within contour lines so that the model smooths without zig/zag shadows across what should be smooth when subdividing and or deforming. Its a little more dificult to see the resultant edge loops when you have terminating edgesw in your low rez cage but they continue just fine after a sub-divide.
Often though 3 and 5 sided polygons have been problematic for people who are trying to fight how they naturally subdivide, not undertanding why they behave as they do.
I never said I was the creator of a method. Maybe someone else implied it, I guess one could get that impression from some reactions to my topology… I’m sure there are many others more who do the same thing.
As for crits, well okay: when your arm is straight down, I think the line of the clavicle merges into the deltoid slightly curved, this could be more angular. Also, in arms down: the back contour of the deltoid is too prominent, I’d push it in a bit. And I think it would look better with a slightly more concave shape right where the deltoid meets the pec…
Also the profile shot on the foot/ankle looks a bit off to me. Well it’s hard to explain but easy to draw, I hope you know what I mean.
As for chaos, skin slides over hard and soft forms (diferently…) and so really the mesh should not conform too perfectly to forms that it will not hold.
True, although I think you’d only notice a problem on scapulas, in bare-skinned slo-mo closeup. Until I’m able to get a good muscle simulator into my pipeline I’m forced to compromise. I’ve tried influence nodes and sculpt spheres, and that don’t work too good… the website recently mentioned with a muscle and skin plugin seems to be down. Anybody got any ideas on this subject? Other than Absolute Character Tools, which is still only Beta for Maya?
Originally posted by Stahlberg
True, although I think you’d only notice a problem on scapulas, in bare-skinned slo-mo closeup. Until I’m able to get a good muscle simulator into my pipeline I’m forced to compromise. I’ve tried influence nodes and sculpt spheres, and that don’t work too good… the website recently mentioned with a muscle and skin plugin seems to be down. Anybody got any ideas on this subject? Other than Absolute Character Tools, which is still only Beta for Maya?
This is the problem. ACT isnt gold in Maya and pipes that have good deformers that would work arent using “off the shelf” software. I wonder what it wold take to right a deformer plug in using the closest point on surface node so that we could make a nurbs scapula that geometry would slide over nicely. Any Mel Gurus here?
__ edit
I just ran accross a thread for something called Musculo… anyone know anything about this? It sounds like what I described above.
A colleague showed me Musculo, I thought it was only an easy way of creating muscles, instead of having to create all the constraints and expressions etc by hand… no ‘skin-sliding’ in it… but I could be wrong.
Wow this is alot to digest. I was hoping Mr. Stahlberg that you could post some close ups of your models hands and feet. Those are the parts that are giving me the most trouble now. I was also wondering about the knuckles in the feet and the hands. I was looking at your foot tutorial and there doesn’t seem to be any edges in those areas. How do you handle them do you only have the knuckles of the the hands modeled or do you not model those either. Do you handle them completely with texturing? One more thing I’m thinking about getting an anatomy book but I’m not sure which one would be the best since I can really only afford one. Is there one that you recommend?
Dave
Originally posted by Stahlberg
Another thing people don’t like about my topologies is the random chaotic look - it seems ‘dirty’ to some. But this is exactly what is needed for human bodies - chaos. You want to avoid ‘clean’.
The default behaviour of any 3d program is smoothness, clean-ness, geometric simplicity. So models often look too regular, as if stylized on purpose, as if milled in a machine by some simplistic CAD program.
Flesh is never regular, it always curves in all directions and the curvature changes constantly. There aren’t 2 square inches on our bodies shaped exactly the same. There are no straight lines, no perfectly circular or elliptical arcs, no 90 degree corners…
Amen !!! er Exactly !
BTW thank you Mr Stahlberg for this wonderfull thread
titaniumdave - i think if you’ve got decent enough internet service which is readily accessible to you, you should not necessarily go out and buy an anatomy book if the money’s already tight like you are suggesting that it is.
Use this site this guy linked to earlier in this thread:
It’s a great site. Plus there are a lot of other fantastic anatomy reference sites out there, no shortage at all. So save that money or invest in a different book, IMO.
yes Mr. Stahlberg, more mesh closeups please! …so we can copy - err, i mean reference - your topology detail.
Thanks for the link Quizboy. I forgot all about after reading the 7000 replies after it . Now back to trying to make this head not look so fat :hmm: .
Dave
Mr Stahlberg is certainly quite the talented inovator! Steven, I love your 0 level mesh, Is there any way you would post wireframe profiles or at least create a tutorial on your site? Do you start with a boxy mesh then add edges? Do you test the deformations as you model the joints? Please more wires!
:bounce: :bounce: :bounce: