Im making a Male base mesh in my free time and would like some advice on how to proceed.
The way Im making this is by modeling the muscles and stitching them together.
Any advice is much appreciated.
The way Im making this is by modeling the muscles and stitching them together.
Any advice is much appreciated.
looks pretty good, but we could use a wireframe render to properly critique it.
You’ll never finish this one 
You got an insane amount of polygons already and will never be able to create decent poly loops anymore.
It´s also not very helpful to model one part before the next one is done. You haven’t finished your upper legs and started the lower legs
but you don’t have any idea how many edgeloops will come down.
You’re paying too much attention to detail at the moment. As this is obviously no box modelling the main goal should be to create a basic male with as few loops as possible and lateron start to cut and add new loops to create more detail.
The position of your arms and legs is not good either. You should start in a restpose, I generally start with the legs slightly spread and bent, the arms around 45° downward slightly bent as well and the back hollow. This will relax deformation after rigging and also initialize IK chains properly and on top of that you’ll get no problems weightpainting.
I also started not to model my hands straight, but the way your hand is when you relax it completely.
Your legs seem to be modeled straight downward which isn’t too much of a problem, but your arms.
The shoulder suggest they’ll be hanging straight down. If you animate it and reach over the head, the shoulder portion of the mesh will be squashed to oblivion while the armpit area will stretch to infinity and beyond.
Also troublesome are your hardcore poles with 6 edges. Many organic modellers follow the paradigm to avoid poles at all, while it is not always possible.
You got the areas of the body figured out pretty good, the borders of the portions look good, mainloops defining the basic shape, but all the detail is not necessary at this stage, it’ll just complicate your project unnecessarily.
Arexma, Challenge accepted.
Each muscle is modeled to match up with the pre modeled muscles, so I do know how many edge loops will come down. As for the arms, they are not straight down but at around a 25-35 degree angle to the sides with a 10-15 degree angle to the back, which I find allows for a more natural base pose, but that might just be me :P.
The hands over head problem will pose a challenge though looking back. maybe my modeled man just wont be very flexible ♫~(-)
But the knee and elbow will be interesting to do when I reach them…
Then do it like a boss.
I enjoy looking at topologies by people having a basic anatomical understanding, but not abiding to the “laws of topology”.
There are often fresh ideas in those meshes worth a try.
Personally I’ve got a female mesh I am doodling around now for 2 years. Usually I finish a portion because I wanted to try something, then it stays dorment for half a year and once I see a new intresting idea I delete huge portions of the mesh again and start over. It´s very enjoyable 
Still it should not be the goal to work out as much detail as possible with the base mesh and after all that’s what you call it.
You should finish the basemesh, then start with detail. This also has the advantage that you can reuse it more easy lateron for sculpting and for baking normal/bump/cavity on it. Else you’ll have to retopo the whole finished basemesh to create a basemesh
Well, it’s not a base mesh imo; but it looks good. I would say the topology might cause you issues as it doesnt flow size-wise; there are many abrupt changes in size of adjacent faces.
Check out Jonathon Williamson’s tuts on blender cookie. http://cgcookie.com/blender/; he is a huge fan of getting topology right and allowing for good flow.
