I made a Mewtwo mesh a few years ago which now looks like garbage so I’m giving him another go. I intend to rig up and animate this model for a portfolio but most importantly I want the topology to be good. Unfortunately topology is something I’m not very good at so I need some help getting the face right. Here’s my progress so far:
At the moment I have lots of poles and a triangle mixed in there, I only put it there so there was something for now. What do you guys suggest I should do to get rid of it and make my loops nice and tidy? Thanks for your input
An occasional triangle is probably no biggie unless it is noticable in the render. It looks to me like you could probably get by with less polys, but the edgeflow looks pretty smooth. Since you are just getting to the eye, I would reccomend placing the eyeball, scaling it up slightly, and then using the retopo tool to transition into the eyeball shape. I have found the retopo tool in 2.5 is inferior to 2.49, but for little jobs it does ok.
Yeah I would say you can get the same shape with 80% less polygons, unless you need the details for sculpting. Forehead,around mouth and eyes can be greatly reduced. Always start simple and add polys as you go.
Thanks for the comments everyone Yeh low poly has always been an Achilli’s Heel of mine so I’ll see how we go.
@ RiVit: I’d already tried that out but hadn’t kept it because when I subdivided and smoothed the mesh it created a kink in the surface I’ll give the retopo a go, I guess if the odd pole or triangle isn’t too disasterous I might not strain myself getting rid of them.
I’ll finish the shape of the head for now and then retopo for fewer polys this evening.
Cheers guys The body is up next, so far I’m sitting on about 700 faces so if I keep the poly count consistent this model may find a use in a game or something
I’ve tried to pay attention to the usual muscle appearance in people around the shoulders and using a few wireframes from other users’ models I think it’s about right.
UPDATE: Done, the model is finished, here’s my final render (rendered in Blender Internal with post processing in Photoshop):
I just had my 3D class today so I’ve got another update; the torso is pretty much complete. There are a few polishing things to do but at the moment I’m just trying to get the basic shape which I’ll tweak once the model is complete. Unfortunately because of a assignment I was just given today I’ll have to put this on the back-burner for a week or two but feel free to post any suggestions or comments I can work on when the distractions are out of the way What do you think?
For the last wireframe I rendered the mesh normally, then duplicated the mesh, scaled along the normals a fraction and added a black material set to Wire instead of Surface. Then I rendered that, overlayed the two renders in Photoshop and set the wireframe blending method to Difference (I think it was Difference, either that or Divide) so that the black lines appeared white instead.
Thanks for the suggestion FreeMind, I’ll have a look at it all once I go back to clean everything up. Bit of an update: he now has the rest of his torso, a tail and the beginnings of legs. Something seems a bit off about them at the moment but I can’t quite figure out what, it’s mostly obvious from the perspective view so it might just be the angle. What do you guys think?
the right image is a perspective view, right?
well, that kinda looks like he’s leaning back a bit. Maybe you gotta bring his legs a bit back to make him look more stable.
Of course, that’s relativized by the tail which allows for a good deal of extra-stability, untailed bipeds wouldn’t have…
Looking at reference-images, he usually does have that a little back-leaning, though… However, those are usually ones with a certain degree of action in them… Here is a fairly good one, though truncated and “drawn from below” (worm’s eye), so it’s a little difficult to know wether he’s normally leaning back or that’s just the view…
What you do currently miss, however, seems to be the, let’s call it, back side of the ribcage…
Note how the “cage” doesn’t go down like it would in humanoids, but it rather is placed “outside”, more like a type of armor. There is nothing below the arms. it’s like a super-thick shirt that only goes around the top of the shoulders, the chest and the top portion of the spline.
I’d recommend to go through scenes of the first movie with mewtwo in them to find good frames to use as reference…
Thanks for the great feedback kram1032, I think there might be a bit of a proportion issue with his head too, it might be a bit too big which throws everything else out. The back of the cage is kind of there now but it’s just about pronouncing it more and playing around with the position of things. I’ll post an update once I finish fighting with Maya for my 3D class
EDIT: Here’s a bit of progress with the model, I think this looks better:
Yeh low poly has always been an Achilli’s Heel of mine so I’ll see how we go.
I’ll give the retopo a go, I guess if the odd pole or triangle isn’t too disasterous I might not strain myself getting rid of them.
What do you think?
