Been working on this today, as I decided I needed some practice doing people/body topology. Working from reference, but mainly aiming to define muscle groups etc with good edge flow for the moment. Any crits would be appreciated!
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Image isn’t displaying right in the thread, but:
http://lh4.ggpht.com/_ELXBbzAjzOE/SX_ZGkeamJI/AAAAAAAABLk/bYg9Nnhu6Xk/s1024/Figure%20Study1.jpg
Copying and pasting it seemed to work. (edit - figured it out - it’s the space in your filename, use underscores or hyphens where possible.)
Very clean topology, which I would expect from you 
and it looks like a good start for a character that will deform well under different poses.
Obviously you have posted in the other thread on topology in Focussed Critique at the moment so you would have seen the Spiderman topology. Can’t really go wrong taking a good hard look at it for hints on a topology that deforms nicely as well as being simply good edge loops. The area I like most about it is how the upper torso flows into the arms with as many loops as possible flowing across the chest and out from the shoulder / back muscles into the length of the arm.
On your topology, the two main hints I would have for the moment (assuming you want this to be good for animation - even if you aren’t going to animate much yourself) would be to add a continuous face loop over the shoulder and under the armpit (I say that a lot…) and possibly a loop under and even another above the belly button - at least one being continuous if possible. Something about a four 5 pole verticies around the centre of the torso where bending will occur just worries me a bit from a rigging/deformation point of view.
One more thing - you have quite an even distribution of polys over the mesh, which is good. Will help with UV unwrapping and also sculpting if you intend to go that far.
Good stuff.
I agree, this looks great!
I assume you plan to work some more on the arms and legs. These are just cylinders at this time. Both the elbows and knees could use some more loops.
Keep posting!
/ Mats
Thanks both of you. I had the spiderman topology image open as I worked - it’s a fantastic reference, and I’ve been following Ataru’s thread for tips as well.
@BenDansie: Now that you mention it, there are a lot of poles around the sides of the abs, I’ll probably have to do something about that.
@Matts Haldin: Quite right, just havent got around to working on the limbs much yet.
Sorry about the image, it should be fixed now. It’s just that I think imageshack doesn’t allow nudity I think, so I had a go with picasawebs.
Does anyone have good reference for a female hand? Most of what I’m finding tends to be male hands.
Progress so far on the hand. I started out trying to tweak an old one but decided a) that the topology was crap and it was going to be hell to get the right number of verts around the wrist out of it, and b) that that was kind of cheating anyway since this is a learning excercise. So I started from scratch, using a bottom (palm) view reference, and added some general guides with grease pencil (shown):
By bens87 at 2009-01-28
And on the foot. Quite happy with the toes so far, but I feel the upper surface of the foot and the general silhouette need some more work.
Attachments
For references of female hands, have a look at Got3D:
http://free-textures.got3d.com/natural/free-character-references/free-character-texture-references-woman-4/index.html
There are several other examples there you might find useful.
Doesn’t the topology of the palm look wrong?
/ Mats
Yes, the toes look great. I think the foot itself should be more arched, both longitudinally and transversally.
Keep it up
/ Mats
@ Mats Halldin Yeah, I know what you mean. Down the “pinky” side.
Right, I’m going to be brave and try and show all the bits that currently look rubbish :eek:.
Current to do list:
- Palms (as above)
-Joining the ankles to the base of the calf - this currently looks very messy.
-Defining muscles in the forearm/elbow. (Not so much bad as just not done yet.)
Attachments
Your model’s looking good. One thing you may want to pay some more attention to is the form of the back, which looks to me to be too concave in some of its curvature. The rib cage generally is more convex in this region, sometimes very subtly, depending on the person. The paintover’s rough but indicates what I mean:
The upper curve of the buttocks could less bulk, also, though this is most noticeable only from certain viewpoints.
Thanks Chipmasque, I shall probably fix that. The arm obscures that area on my reference so it was tricky to gage, but imagining the ribcage there, it should be as you say.
Anyway, I’ve fixed a number of the issues above today, so I’ll try and show some more progress.
Hand:
Foot. Still not happy with this - it’s occurred to me that this is the first I’ve tried to make though, and I’m not in the habit of staring at feet all day, so I suppose its just going to be more work than faces, hands, ect, that one can more easily imagine the form of. :rolleyes:
And a Head! Bonus points to me if anyone sees a resemblance to Natalie Portman.
Concerning hand topology: Here is an old image I use as my main reference ans source of inspiration (i.e. I don’t claim I ever modelled a good hand):
And here is a page with some good examples:
http://wiki.polycount.net/Limb_Topology
/ Mats
This is a model I made based off a tutorial, which I lost a while back, but it had some excellent topology.
Full credit goes to the author of said tutorial.
Check out this thread, it will help you to use less poles with a 6 edges ;):
http://www.subdivisionmodeling.com/forums/showthread.php?t=907
More on the head:
Also, the hands and feet are are properly attached to the body now, and mostly look good. So my current plan is to start a bit of the rigging and see what issues it presents with the topology and so forth. I’ve already messed about a bit with a quick 5 minute heat weighted rig, and there are obviously some issues at the groin and shoulder that need attention. Ben Dansie, your suggestion to add a face loop around the shoulder definitely seems like a good idea looking at the shoulder deformation as it curently stands.
Turntable animation, hopefully this might help people spot any flaws in topology too:
Now working on a more serious rig, starting from the feet upward. I’ve basically copied Calvins foot rig from this page, and it works very nicely. I might go back and rig the toes individually at some point, but it isn’t a priority.
I’m debating what solution to go for at the knees now. I’m not sure whether to go for a helper bone style system, or just to use shapekeys. I think probably the former, since I want to rely on shapekeys as little as possible, especially whilst I’m still revising the topology.
Adding a skeleton to the shoulders completely messed them up - the topology was really not suitable for deformation as it was before, but at the same time they were difficult to work on in that pose. So, I posed the arms in a T position and applied the deformation, and re-worked the shoulder area from scratch. Here’s the result:
Work on rigging the hand, some way to go on this:
Inside of the mouth:
