This comes from an old model, one body and many heads. I made a big rearrangement of vertices and faces. I removed all triangles and simplified, removing thousands of vertices. But my starting point were chaotic meshes, so the result is not planned and optimal and all heads are totally inconsistent.
1.- A “before and after” image. 2.- A lot of heads. (Click to enlarge)
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I know those heads look all to similar, so creating more unique characters is also a challenge to me.
After modeling about twenty characters on a mesh that didn’t allow me to add or remove any vertices (the Makehuman project) I slowly realized the advantages of using one basic mesh, which among other things would allow me to model reusable face expressions, phonetic keys and corrective ipo driven keys for good joint deformations only once for all characters. New characters would have all this expressions done with little modifications needed.
So I need to start with a basic mesh with good edge loops. This is the initial work on the head, based on part of the MH mesh with two of my own targets applied, a female body and one of the average people targets. After some changes in this mesh I think I managed to keep the good parts, removing all triangles.
Current progress, no more triangles anywhere:
The head has been stitched to a body which is my own old model, and needs a lot of corrections. After this, I plan to create emotion, phoneme and corrective shapes and figure a way to export them to every character. The new Key module provides a way to access key geometry (although currently buggy) so it shouldn’t be difficult to get the differences to create relative targets. My next step is to make or remake different female characters, not necessarily all my previous ones.
I know there can’t be a “generic” female topology for all ages and types, but this base can provide anyway for much flexibility. So… Any opinions about the flow of edgeloops for animation and facial expression? Or on the modelling? This same mesh is intended to be reused for several characters, so it has to be good before I start them.
I don’t know much about head modelling jet, and even less about animation. I’m working on my first head model at the moment (it’s here), and it seems to me that the edge loops which start at the middle of the nose bridge should go around the eyes, and not the mouth, for easier modelling (tho I haven’t tried it). No idea how either works out for animation.
A thing that will probably interest you ist the topology research thread at CGTalk. Many images are missing and I haven’t read it to the end (it’s really long), but there’s some valuable information / examples concerning generic face (and seemingly body) topology.
Just noticed: many of the pics missing before seem to be on page 35 (page before last) now
BumGravy: Here is an image without wires. Good thing you asked for it, the wires were hiding some errors. I did reduce eyelashes and defined cheekbones but these details are not so important for now as topology, loop flow, anatomy.
mexx: I had just being reading that thread before posting here, but I gave up because of the missing images. Thanks for finding them, those images help a lot.
Head joined to body. Work is needed at shoulders, hands and feet.
At the price of added geometry, added a little muscle detail to the arms.
Then worked on fixing incorrections around the neck, especially the highlighted polygons, they were very wrong.
And more loops and corrections around the shoulders.
A nude test render. Now she looks muscular. Anyway smoothing for a softer body is more possible than trying to get muscular detail from a mesh without enogh polygons.
The whole body has about 6700 quad polygons, including head and teeth.
I think it’s really well done, and not too many polys to boot!
I really don’t think she’s too muscular, and you actually might want to flesh her out a bit around the rib cage area. Also, her stomach seems to dip in a bit before going out in the pubic region… You might want to make it bigger.
nice, it looks really good. i recently restructured a head also, and i came up with an interesting way to go about it. i planned out my polys using texture paint first, then, i made a duplicate, and subdivide a few times, then…i cranked up the vertex size a bit in themes, and started going over the thing, toggling in and out of edit mode to line up my mouse, and added a group, consisting of vertexes made at wherever a juncture of edges was, then did a select swap / delete and faced the remaining group. sort of tedious, but not too bad. definately gets the job done though.
Old hand. The palm is short and those polygons at the knucles aren’t really triangles but two quads sharing two edges, I suppose that is wrong.
The hand after working on it. I added a loop around around every fingernail for sharper detail. I did a lot of work here, more than I expected.
Front view showing the hand and a remodelled (and a bit more twisted) forearm.
Thanks! (and everyone watching).
digital_me: Yes, I agree about the stomach and the rib cage. The thorax and waist area are my next step.
Modron: Your method sounds good but somewhat complicated. Restructuring a mesh is sort of an art in itself. Basically I never delete any face. I use a lot of ctrl T, cntl F and alt J to rearrange the flow of edges. Of course cutting and removing vertices and loops is also necessary.
I think there is now a cleaner flow between the ribs and the upper abdomen after the some remodelling which resulted in the removal of several polygons in that area.
The lower abdomen needed some better flowing geometry to create a better shaped stomach, as Digital_me pointed out.
The back should have been my next assignment, but I went back to the head because some details were bugging me.
The five polygon junction under the eye (highlighted in the first image) had caused trouble when modeling Makehuman targets, so I decided to place it in a lower loop in the middle of the cheekbone.
mexx: (if you read this) Or it can do both. That loop now goes around the eyes AND around the mouth. I think it works.
(No, this is not a superhero mask, but some colored image I made to try to show how the new flow divides the face)
This is an excellent example of what Blender can do. Very well done. If you wouldn’t mind would you share your hair settings? You’ve not only demonstrated near perfect loops, but very excellent hair which I hope to hear more about.
WeWa: Here is a detail of the ear with some last minute adjustments:
Streen: Yes, I love Blender as a modeling tool. The hair object is no big deal, just recycled from an old model so the girl is not bald, this work is about topology. Anyway… if you want to take a look, you can download it with textures and settings if you download the model in my signature.
I am currently working in the upper back, snapshots coming soon…
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