Body topology

#2561

Tamas,

Thanks! I actually do appreciate the time that you’ve put into it, the explanation of your workflow is great and I may be able to use your example when I try to revamp the curriculum, it’s struggle to make some schools add and drop things from their curriculum. The first model I posted was supposed to be a blend a lot of low poly and high poly detail. it was built to meet a specific contract. That’s one of the reasons why it goes from low frequency to higher frequency areas and not strictly silhouette driven or denser. I am curious though when you say 7,000 polygons do you mean quads or tris? I’ve been given low poly counts and always in tris. So 7,000 tris would be 3500 quads.

Most the developers around me are working on android and IOS devices, so I’ve been catering more into that market (with the processors speed growing so quickly, I think 10K should be the norm soon any thoughts?). Also I’m wondering what your preference is in the 3D coat vs. Topogun war (avoiding NEX since plugins are harder to get admins to commit too). I am looking at getting one of them into the curriculum. The upper limit for the computers have average is 30,000 per scene (4 to 8 gigs of ram average)…

I’m really curious as to how to twist in more detail in without Zbrush seeing that one location doesn’t have any sculpting based programs. Hence the tracing of higher poly geometry to think about the topology. if you don’t mind… should I focus more on the high details or base anatomy? I’ve finally been given a chance to rewrite a modeling curriculum so anything anyone thinks I should consider from anyone would be helpful.

As for not being at the front, I think your a bit modest. Through the summer I think I showed the trailer Digic worked on at least five times.

#2562

Heh, thanks. Always keep in mind that it’s just one possible workflow, one that fits our needs and constrains the most.

I’m going to take a look into resurfacing tools. Currently, I think that my best bet is learning good edge flow and modeling techniques. That way, when it comes time for me to use the sculpting method, I will have the skills necessary to create an accurate base mesh.

Depends on what you want to do…

If you want to create nice stills, it’s mostly irrelevant. You can nowadays easily render multi-million polygon models in nearly every app, so a straight export from Zbrush will work. If there’s any small detail left out you can add it with normal mapping.

If you’re looking for a character modeling position it’s useful to be good at both sculpting and resurfacing, especially in the game industry - although they have somewhat different goals and methods. Like re-using basemeshes is far more common, in order to keep UVs and bone weighting.

Or you could try to specialize, but large VFX studios also prefer industry experience, it’s rare to hire beginners.

All in all I think every good organic character has to start in Zbrush or Mudbox (not counting the basemesh you start the sculpt from, but then again I’m not a fan of Zspheres).

So I guess the point is, there are no best practices, just a toolbox that you can search for the best fitting solution…

#2563

Yeah, that I know of… :wink: Feel free to use anything and let me know if I can help with anything else.

I am curious though when you say 7,000 polygons do you mean quads or tris? I’ve been given low poly counts and always in tris. So 7,000 tris would be 3500 quads.

Well, as I’ve probably already mentioned, it depends - game artists always count triangles, but others count polygons so one quad is still only one polygon.

Most the developers around me are working on android and IOS devices, so I’ve been catering more into that market

Yeah, that’s definitely different and you do need to optimize down to triangle levels. Is normal mapping available on those platforms? It really is an important aspect of both the visuals and the content creation.

Also I’m wondering what your preference is in the 3D coat vs. Topogun war (avoiding NEX since plugins are harder to get admins to commit too).

I’ve never really tried 3D Coat because it didn’t look interesting at the time I’ve been using Topogun (happily). I’ve only moved to Wrapit (3ds max tool) because it reduced the number of apps I had to keep track of - Zbrush and Maya were already enough of a burden and I still need to get up to date with Mudbox.
Still, 3D Coat has a lot more functionality as it’s also a sculpting and texture painting app with some innovative new tools, mainly because it’s privately owned.

I am looking at getting one of them into the curriculum. The upper limit for the computers have average is 30,000 per scene (4 to 8 gigs of ram average)…

That sounds very, very strange. 30,000 polys is a very low number, the 5-year old consoles can routinely push at least a million triangles per frame. But they render most of them at least 2-3 times for all the special rendering passes so they can actually process about a hundred million polygons per second easily.

I’m really curious as to how to twist in more detail in without Zbrush seeing that one location doesn’t have any sculpting based programs. Hence the tracing of higher poly geometry to think about the topology. if you don’t mind… should I focus more on the high details or base anatomy? I’ve finally been given a chance to rewrite a modeling curriculum so anything anyone thinks I should consider from anyone would be helpful.

It’s kinda confusing here… Typical workflow for games is to start with a high poly and bake at least the normal maps to the low poly from that. But many studios go as far as to texture the high res and this way they can tweak the ingame lowpoly as much as they want to without losing existing work. Zbrush (or Mudbox) is pretty much inevitable for most pipelines.
The only case where you don’t need such a sculpting app is if you can’t even use normal mapping but so far that’s only been the Nintendo DS and mobile phone game territory. However an iPhone 4 or most Android devices should be powerful enough for that, too.

Still, sculpting is so much more natural and easier to use for character work that it’s a must have in any school IMHO. Technology keeps on advancing and within 5 years we may not even have game consoles, just a docking station for our phones so that it can connect with the TV and the wireless controllers…

As for not being at the front, I think your a bit modest. Through the summer I think I showed the trailer Digic worked on at least five times.

Well, thanks :slight_smile: but I think we still have a long way to go with our characters and facial animation…

#2564

try to spread out some of your geometry to make it look a bit better when smoothed.

#2565

Hi guys this will be my first post to this thread. Just want to say I think that all of you are totally amazing. I would love to have some c&c. I’m really having difficulty with the anatomy and topology.

#2566

Hey mate,

there are a lot of ways you can go around things, depending on the purpose of the model, your skill level in modeling, and maybe also the skill level of your rigger.
enlighten us some more on these few areas, and our comments can be much more specific and suit your needs :slight_smile:

anyhow, this is what i would say right off the bat (and im assuming you want to do some generic animation with this):

-model your characters with arms at about 40-45angle, it will make it easier for the rigger to hit the right poses and not struggle too much with the shoulder region.
-model the hand slightly cupped. the reasoning behing these two comments has to do with rigging. - if a joint has a 90deg. of freedom on one axis, it doesnt make sense to model it at 0 deg and then worry about creating correctives for nice deformations, IF you can fix it by modeling it a little bent already and avoid correctives at all. This goes for the fingers mainly, especially for the thumb. always think about the movement of the part. how often do you lift your thumb so that it creates a plane with the rest of the hand? probably not that often :wink: more natural is it going ‘down’ from the palm. if you think about stuff like this, it’s gonna help you enromously in the next stages.

now for the topology itself:
-the abs are one area that you can do many ways, but yours feels kinda messy. if you wanna trace skeletal structures/muscles, do it right. - the ribcage could go lower, the abs loop doesn’t have to create a round U shape at the bottom…

-the breasts could defly use less polys to keep the model somewhat uniform in sense of detail. it won’t change the shape or very little, and will present a cleaner model.

-you could use more loops/definition at the elbow, for better deformations later on

-i see some weird pole on the inside of the forearm, just before the wrist, that doesn’t need to be there :slight_smile:

-you have a weird quad at the pelvis region. i understand you wanted to trace the external oblique or the pelvis, but you could get rid of it or end that loop better or even continue that loop down the leg.

-the back of the knee doesn’t need this amount of detail. if you want to stress the tendons, you can do a split down the edges. i gave my best to illustrate down in the pic ^^

anyhow, that’s my initial 2 cents.
always think about the movement of the body. when you bend over, there are wrinkles forming on your lower abs. how would you want the rigger to handle that right, if the topology doesn’t allow for it?
it’s this thinking ahead, that makes you a better modeller.

aaaaand im out. :slight_smile:

hope this is of use.

P.S. for some reason the CGSociety attachments and such doesn’t work for a change, so here’s a link ^^ http://postimage.org/image/ak0qxh20x/

#2567

nemeru - Thanx for a very helpful comment. i have spent some time reworking my model and ill be sharing my update as time goes by. my skill level is something only other people will be able to tell. Although I am a modeller by heart, my original mesh i made was to be used only for sculpting and then retopo in.

i have a long way to go with this model and i would like to eventually be able to impress someone i look up to soon(well at least that would be awesome if i can pull that off).

So here my update as off yet.

#2568

Haya wonderful people of CGS. have desided to do a whole retopo of my character’s body.

I wish to have some Crit or even paintovers from you guys.I’m kinda running dry on inspiration atm.

im having issues with the legs atm and im running dry of inspiration. please help.

#2569

Well, barring the pole above the knee, and the fact that the knee itself could do with an edge down the middle, it looks pretty ok to me.

#2570

You need to avoid triangle near area joint . If character for animation/cinematic and ll be with tourbosmooth over- need to avoid triangles everywhere. If it ingame character -in most of area truants is okay :slight_smile: also topology depends from which part of character will be animated

#2571

A model I’ve been working on recently. I started with a sculpt in ZBrush to figure out the proportions of the model, then I used Topogun to build different iterations of a low poly version and have been testing them with a walkcycle animation in Maya as I’ve been building a rig for it.

I mainly work as an animator/rigger but I trying to get better at modeling and studying animal anatomy too at the moment so that I can build complete creature rigs from scratch.

This mesh seems pretty good to me now as it’s deforming pretty well when animated, I’m interested to see if there are any notes on it though if anyone has some, I plan to bring it back to ZBrush next and start sculpting details and painting textures. My goal with this eventually is to have a good quality realistic creature that I can animate and render for a portfolio piece.

Cheers,
Brian

#2572

Hey guys, so I wanna chip in with a question:

do you have an idea about a resource, be it from movie, some making of, or personal experience, about good working topology (trying to avoid the word ‘correct’ since i don’t believe there is just one :slight_smile: ) for a muscle simulation rig? the model in question is a photorealistic male, and im just super-curious as to how people tackle this… The only nice working reference i found is the still-best-looking-muscle-rig-on-youtube by Adom Yip here…

if you know of any such resource, im always on the lookout for another point of view on topology for photorealistic creatures/humans/quadrupeds, etc…

thanks in advance :slight_smile:

#2573

Hi nemeru!

Can this be a reference?
http://renpoo.cgsociety.org/gallery/835696/

#2574

hey renpoo!

thanks for your gallery, it definitely is another point of view!
i’ll give it a closer look when i get home from work.

could still use some behind the scenes of something tho :slight_smile: im curious how they deal with this in feature studios…

#2575

I would place the deformation loops for the knee below the patella. The patella travels mostly with the femur. The knee region is more complicated than just a single extruded “cap”. It’s at least two extrusions, with the deformation loops forming a border between them. The upper is the patella. The lower would comprise the surface bulges created from the infrapatellar fat pad and the top of the tibia.

As for muscle topology, it may sound like a trite answer but I think it boils down to how the muscle or muscle group moves and building a topology that allows for it to stretch, bulge and collapse in those directions. Depending on the detail of the model, you could look at it like a hard surface model where every attached piece has some sort of border loops where they attach to the main. Slide them apart or closer together for less or more muscle definition.

#2576

I do not believe that this type of mesh is for animation and games. Mesh broken and with many many Ngons. Zbrush or Mudbox not accept this mesh. This type of topology is garbage.

#2577

This is my geometry:
I think very usefully, I can use very well for rigging.
And very easy from this geometry make another new body type, fat or skinny too.

textured version:
male body



#2578

I don’t know your background, but the Thread opener is a senior figure artist with lots of awesome figure models. Claiming his models to be garbage is nonsense. He has the artistical skills to make it work.

Of course the usuall 4 sided polygon modeling should be prefered for the daily work. Because it is standard and producing a quality standard is the goal for professionals. :wink:

#2579

Awesome figure models that can have issues if animated.

#2580

Awesome :slight_smile: