body modeling

Support Modeling
#1

Hi.
Recently I’ve just finished sculpting a girl’s head.
(I attached it’s picture.)
This is the first 3D model of my life which I made it.
My final purpose is a 3D model that has a whole body and rigs for animation.
Also, I want to give my ‘girl’s head’ facial rigs.

But I don’t have any idea to reach it.

First… How can I sculpt the body?
Should I sculpt the whole body? or sculpt it part by part?
Should I sculpt it without the head or not?

If you have any guide lines, please tell me.

p.s. The condition of my model is still ‘multires’. (I didn’t apply in ‘modifier’)

Attachments


#2

What ever your doing is fine, it looks good. You should post the mesh, Its important for animation. you can find here in this forum somewhere Othellos face rig , If I find it I’ll send you the link, You need to see it… There are tutorials on body modeling, You can use a blank and re shape it. You can retopo one and then reshape it. but Im not the expert.

#3

You could either start with a mesh that has arms and legs extruded.
Sculpt the body, and then retopo that mesh based on good topology.
Ir you can make a mesh, with nice topology, and sculpt that.

You could sculpt limb by limb, but then you’ll have to reattache them, and that usually doesn’t work well with the multi-res. So i’d sculpt the body as a whole.

#4

Excellent proportions in the bust, very good for a first model. However even without seeing a shot of the wireframe of the mesh, I can see clues that it’s not well designed for animation, mainly due to the lack of edge loop flow. Since you’re very new to this you may want to look up those terms to get a better handle on mesh topology (another word to research), which has a major influence on how well a model will animate.

The Othello face rig & model mentioned above can be found at the link in my signature. It’s not a simple rig so you’ll probably not understand all its features and design aspects at first, but it’s a place to start in terms of face rigging ideas, and the model has decent topology that would be good for you to study.

In terms of modeling an entire human figure, my advice is to start simple and develop complexity in the model as you go along, paying attention to good edge loop flow and other topology considerations. Just as in working with physical materials (which I think maybe you have some experience with), it’s better to block out a figure in its entirety and then work it toward greater detail all at once than to concentrate on parts. This helps preserve proportions and continuity in terms of detail.

You can also get some experience with rigging by building a simple armature for your figure early on, and trying it out as you work more detail into the figure. You’ll learn better how meshes deform under armature control, how to deal with vertex weighting and other similar issues, and correcting problems will be easier if you begin with a simpler model. By the time you get to a more detailed model, you should have a much better idea of how to make it move the way you want.

One tip: Put only as much detail as is absolutely necessary into your animated mesh – keep it as “lean” as possible in terms of polygon count and mesh density. The simpler the mesh, the easier it is to set up for animation, and you can use methods like normal mapping to give the illusion of high detail without actually using a high-density mesh.

#5

If you are building parts of body one by one, at some point you need to attach them to each other right? So you are going to need to set them up in a way so that each segment joint need to have same number of vertexes. And mesh need to flow between those boundaries. Keep that in mind. It helps to have the mesh count low for that reason as well.

#6

Thank you all!

For the rigging and animating, I’d like to retopo the head. Sculpt whole body and retopo it.
If retopoed model is not good for animation, then I’ll try to make another model by traditional way (control the vertexes, edges, and faces).

#7

This is one way, but you may find it easier to get good sculpting results from a properly built model with good topology rather than adapt something that was not built for efficient sculpting from the get-go.

Good topology in a mesh is not just a requirement for animation, but also helps other tools like Sculpt work better because you’re not fighting against the flow of the mesh lines when trying to achieve good forms on your model. If you sculpt on a very high-density mesh, then a lot of topology issues are lessened, but that also puts strain on system resources and Blender’s ability to respond quickly when sculpting. Better by far to build the model correct from the start, so as you develop detail, the tools aren’t fighting against poor topological structure.