The goal is to eventually rig and animate this guy.
I sculpted this out using Sculptris just to prove I could do it, and now I am pulling a major retopo in Blender to make it lower res and animation friendly. I intentionally left out some details (like the ears) because I’m just going to redo it all as a real mesh anyway.
I don’t want to screw up the new mesh, however, so any tips would be fine. Here’s the retopo progress so far. Let me know what I’m doing “wrong”. Also, there are no N-Gons, they are all quads.
Thanks, lsmft. I like your zombie. In fact, it’s one of the reason’s why I wanted to take my topology to the next level.
@suctioncup “Jonathan Williamson” is the real buzzword for this kind of thing. You’ll have to dig around Blender Cookie to find his stuff, but here’s a link to get you started: http://cgcookie.com/blender/tag/topology/
Done.
Jon Williamson’s tuts are great, but when you want more detail, it quickly gets to the point where you have to whip out the Sintel DVD and learn how to improvise.
I know. We go through all this WIP effort and no one acts like you’re even alive. The forehead is looking a lot better. He kind of has eyebrows tilted up towards the center, denoting concern or caution. Is this intended? normally for action hero figures the brows tilt down towards the middle, denoting seriousness, meanness or intensity.
I’m curious about the 6-poles on the hands and arms. I’m not a knee-jerk topology purist, just out to scream it’s wrong, but I am curious if they are there for a reason?
@daren - You are right, he looks like something out of a Greek tragedy, but the expression seems arbitrary to me at the moment because of the easiness by which it is changed, as I have demonstrated. Right now I’m settling for something generic until he’s done. I’m also worried about how much topology I’ll need to pull everything off and how much can be passed on to normal maps. It would would be great if I could get the expression to be versatile between both ends of the spectrum, something like this guy and this guy.
@BentFX - Currently, the final hand (wires not provided) has more poles than I care to admit. However, you will see two types: poles in diamonds, intended to increase the mesh density into the hand, and poles that are a somewhat clumsy attempt to redirect the edgeflow to shape the masses of the hand. Messy as they might be, however, I really do hate the alternative box-modelling method that would yield fewer poles but less shape. Jon Williamson’s topology tutorials helped identify key poles, but I made several of my own because I found his edgeflow to be realistically inaccurate (great starting place, though).
@xabotage Well said and I accept that. Seems you’ve thought it through. Yet because I really am a closeted “knee-jerk topology purist” I’m going to spout my hate for poles anyway… Nah, probably not.
I look forward to updates. Have fun!
EDIT: Since it’s already in my attachments I’ll stick it in here again for those who haven’t seen it. Here’s a 3-pole through a 6-pole showing how the cat-clark sub-d treats the faceloops. In the 3-pole the faceloops wrap around the pole. In the quad-pole(not really a pole) they pass straight through. In the 5-pole and to a greater degree in higher order poles the face loops get turned away from the pole and nothing really flows past it. Keep in mind the real reason that n-gons are bad is because they create poles when subdivided
