So yeah… Basic human model or how to stop screaming and do retopo with purpose.
Now, I’m a noob at this, so I’ve decided to test topology as I go, starting with shoulders. It’s a Rigify rig for now and with a little fix to auto-weight paint this is the best variation so far. I think there is something weird about bone placements (I’ll replace the armature later), but all the polys marked red do not seem particularly great either.
What can be done about the flows there without making it too dense? Can things be solved with weight painting? Or is it adding blendshapes/helper bones at this point?
I’ll continue brainstorming this, but any advice is appreciated =)
Thank you! Not sure how exactly I’m going to implement this (I don’t quite understand how shoulders even supposed to work, tbh), but it certainly something to look into.
Got a somewhat better shape of the scapula area by changing the “rest pose” so that shoulders now slightly hunched. Come to think of it, this pose seems more natural than a straight back and much more likely to occur anyway
Rearranged the topogy and… well it looks broken in a different way now, but still a progress!
Had a strong urge to just… be disappointed in everything and give up.
But then it doesn’t look all that bad. Well, except for feet but I knew all along those will be a mess T__T Maybe i’ll try to fix later. Or not. Not like I need them really.
Don’t think I can do anything more with topology for now. That leaves the head. Probably in for trouble connecting it to the rest of the body =D
Improvements and mistakes were made since then. I didn’t even use it all that much in the end, but when I did some issues became more evident.
Anyway, I thought it’s time to re-work it a bit, fix shapes, move some poles around (now I know some places where I absolutely don’t want them to be).
Quads are great and all but I’ve found that it’s better to collapse breast topology into a point at the peak - it becomes easier to modify, it keeps natural shape and doesn’t create annoying artifacts at four poles when subdivided (in exchange you get a star, sure, but it turned out to be a much lesser evil).
Green for cyclic loops going all the way around the form, yellow for U-shaped, blue are just rectangle patches of quads.
Ha, that dreaded feeling when you finished a great topology of the body, but now you need to attach them to the the rest of body parts (hands, feet, and head).
You’ve got a great start on the body already. Hands and feet have always been a pain for me too. It’s hard to explain, but you can get my body template here for some reference.
Crazy, I saw this on Pinterest. Pinned it to my topology reference board too, just so you know.
Anyway, your topology is actually pretty solid. Both the current version and the previous ones. I’ve seen paid models with worse. Sometimes the problem with a rig or it’s pose isn’t topology, it’s weight painting. Or bone placement. Troubleshooting that can be a pain, but I’ve never been satisfied with “automatic weights”
Connecting the ears to the body is what I had the hardest time with. Hands were hard too, but by then I’d accepted the maybe there’d be an edgeflow in the model that wasn’t perfectly neat and I didn’t care. (Probably because I attached the hands after the ears). Though obviously you still want it to be relatively neat.
If it helps, here are some hand topology examples (can’t credit them since I just have a folder of these things).
Oh yes, I was scrolling through some topo references the other day and saw it too - such a confusing experience ='D
So true. For these quick tests I’m adding some extra bones to the chest, hips and hands just to make auto-weights work better. But even then some heavy editing required in shoulder area just to see how it works.
Also I tend to forget that humans are not stick figures, and shoulders and pelvis especially are very complicated mechanisms. It should not be surprising that I can’t solve an extreme pose with one bone where in life it takes, lets say, two plus contracting muscles and stretching skin.
It took a few tries, but I settled on this version with simple(-ish) quad sheet wrapping around the hand - I feel it creates somewhat less artifacts in the silhouette and there’s a very simple flow direction (though it didn’t even occur to me at first).
Fingers and face turned out pretty dense this time, but everything is meant to be collapsible if used for quick retopo.
Oof, I always end up with same 2 edges arriving from the face to the base of the ear. How am I supposed to connect that?
Face is mostly the same, except for density around eyes and the pole that was placed on the cheekbone front side in previous iteration. It was driving me mad - somehow sticking out in 3/4 views all the time! Ugh! Fixed.
Also defined chin loop. It wasn’t there before, which I suppose is ok for realistic multi-res sculpts, but not so good for most of my purposes.
I’m so glad for Sculpt Mode’s Grab and Smooth brushes - retopo is so much faster with them.
…According to old file names, this makes it “version 7”. Let’s see how it’ll work.
This retopo is incredible, I would absolutely pay you for this basemesh. It’s a thousand times better than any of the ones on the market, and while I can (and have) made my own, yours is still better.
My one thought is the knees- usually, they’re done like the elbows with their own loops and extra quads, I’m not sure how well yours will deform currently
It is true, these knees don’t seem to bent very well by default.
This is from earlier model with this kind of topo, no modification or corrective shapekeys (I was lazy):
I still use it because it seems to keep sort of “step” shape well as a base for sculpting. I like it.
Maybe I should make a second bound mesh with topology that addresses joint deformation better…
Well as a rule of thumb dont produce anything more than a 5 star in your topology, catmull clarks weighting of extraordinary points in the smoothing term has problems with that. Thats the main problem I see there. Beside that its not that important in that area, as its flat an stiff and is not gonna be deformed. So dont expect much trouble there. You can/should introduce some edge ring around the ear, but telling you that it has to be that way would be wrong.
You know that moment when you just washed a whole lot of dishes, wiped the tables, dried your hands and with a feeling of a job well done turned to leave the kitchen… only to find that one forgotten frying pan?
That what seeing another 6-star spawned in some new unexpected place feels like
There’s a guy on YouTube named Dikko that explicitly draws his poles onto the face first, in vertex paint mode, before doing any retopo, so he doesn’t have any surprises. It works super well:
Hahaha, sure I know. Btw. did you know that every 6-star can be turned into regular topology? Topologywise you can transform a single 6-star into 2 4-stars locally.
Oh yes, I’ve seen a couple of his videos on poly-modeling a character a while ago - he’s great!
That’s a neat trick.
Tbh, topology causes me to mindlessly panic sometimes. It’s manageable if I lay down some colored loops and patches to remember their function, so I don’t accidently redirect important flows… but more advanced ideas seem to melt my brain =')
Hiii!
I’m sorry for bothering you after so long, I just wanted to ask if it was possible having a side view of this topology? Because there are a lot of part I don’t quite understand when Im trying to study it. The part connect very weirdly on my model when I try to reference it.
I totally understand if that’s not possible, I just though I could ask!
Sorry again for the disturbance, and thank you so much for your time!
