The real reason I’m currently looking into 3d is because I am making a comic, and I’m having some trouble with 3/4 type of views, and keeping my characters consistent. So I decided it might be a good idea to model out the characters.
so this is one of those characters, with a character sheet and a base model I made past few days and cleaned up today(though the mesh lint thing keeps saying the eye-sockets are non-manifold :x). The strange pose is because I recall an animator telling me that the best way the model the base for animation/posing is to make sure all joints are at half-way. That way the polygons are at half-way the possible stretching.
The base model has a poly count of 3029quads/6058tris, and while that’s pretty low-poly, I would like to keep it that way(for manageability.) Unfortunatly, I’ve noticed that subsurf kinda destroys the fine details I wanted.
Anway, so the idea is to produce a posable model in the end, but I’m kinda lost. You see, I’m hardly experienced in modeling characters, and I kinda don’t know what to do next?
You do the uv-mapping before the rigging, right? So do you model clothing/hair before that? And how about different sets of clothing? Can you make a handfull of models and somehow apply the same rigs to them? Or should I give up on cloth to begin with?
/completely lost.
Other commentary is welcome too.
BTW, feel free to scribble on the pictures if you feel you can explain your point better, and because I’m still a restricted user I may seem to respond a little slow.
UV mapping before the rigging or rigging the character before you place a UV texture on the model. Modeling Hair or clothing before or after that? After the model is created, either way will give you the same result. You can choose what to do next. For humanoid characters, you can choose to append and use the same rig over and over again. That’s what I did. That way it improves your work speed. Cloth can be a tricky mistress. There are tutorials that shows you how to apply physics to the clothes on Youtube.
Don’t bother with the halfway-posed joints. It’s a good argument for putting the arms in a 45 degree position rather than straight T-position, but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it applied to elbows and knees. “Slightly bent”, yes, but not to the degree in your model.
Here’s a good video about this issue, that will also give you some pointers about your shoulder geometry. http://vimeo.com/11901510
You can use Creasing to keep details sharp through the Subsurf modifier. Select edges, shift+e… or use the settings at the top of the N-panel.
But it doesn’t work well with Blender’s smooth shading, so in general I’d recommend that you learn to control subdivision sharpness with extra geometry.
Check out the Blendercookie modeling tutorials that are not** about character modeling, since the issue of retaining subsurf-sharpness is more clear-cut when modeling hard-surface objects.
For clothes, I recommend that your first finish modeling and rigging the model. Then you can copy the character and rework the geometry into clothes. That way you get to start off with the same topology and shapes as your base character. And even more convenient: The clothes inherit the rigging weights. When you reach that stage, you can add a Mask-modifier to the character to hide the parts that are covered with clothes, avoiding intersections.
Save the UV-unwrapping until you’re sure you’re finished with the model. It doesn’t look like you actually really need it, but it’s always nice to have it done just in case.
Finally, I think a Rigify-generated rig should be more than enough for your purpose.
