We’re at the heart of organic modeling. This topic is so vast because of all the wacky possibilities there are to move the poles on the grid.
There are a few situations that I discovered which makes a model looks ‘organic’ (instead of hard or mechanic). I’ve seen many noobish models (especially in lizard and head models) that looks just weird. I believe that if you take heed to the following points, you can tweak an old noobish model into something professional looking. The goal is to make the loops blend in the mesh.
Before I go explaining how to move poles around, the following are the situations that makes a model look more organic:
- Use ‘C-loops’ as much as possible! A C-loop is nothing more than half a circular loop of course. So, most of the time this loop will start and end at a terminator of course. Most of the time a terminator will be a hole.
A C-loop (Duh!)
This is just a 5 minute lizard head model. But which do you think looks more organic?
This one?
Or this one?
Both models has roughly the same poly count (around 400), But the mesh of the second one is more evenly distributed. By just adding some C-loops here and there IMO the second one looks better, more organic with flows that blend smoothly.
- Try to avoid too much E-poles that are in direct contact to each other. Example:
Nice, but it doesn’t look organic… rather more mechanic
This is becoming to look better:
As for everything else, be the judge of your own particular situation. I guess, when you are modeling a mouth, I don’t think it should be really necessary to move the poles away. But hey…
- Spiral loops
This will really blend circular topology in your mesh. You can use spiral loops for the eye sockets. A model can look just fine with plain old circular loops, but spiral loops is the solution when you think that your model is in danger of looking mechanic. I guess that if you model a fantasy creature with a lot of bodily perturbations, spiral loops will surely help you out.
One thing to keep in mind when you get into edgeloop is the Spiral Loop. Once you break the extrude Loop you’ll going to get the Spiral effect and when you do, don’t try to rewire it so it goes in a circle because it won’t work.
- Diagonal topology. The modeling of muscular features used to be hard. But once you start using diagonal topology, you’ll start modeling muscles with ease.
For example: that big diagonal muscle across the neck (sternocleidusmastoid)
