I’m making a Kobold lady for a friend of mine, and I’ve hit a wall. My friend, who doesn’t know much about character modeling, tells me that it’s ready to move on to more finer details, like feathers and things, but I, who knows a little more but not that much more about character modeling feels there’s something missing that I have to do before I go onto finer details.
What should I do, adjust, add, subtract, whatever, before I move on to finer details? Anatomical, topological, and/or educational (for me :P) suggestions are all very welcome.
I have made a material of her scales, but it’s not great right now, and I only want to focus on the model itself.
The arms and chest aren’t modeled yet - where are the armpits? where are the elbows? where are the shoulders? Do those first.
You also have a problematically uneven distribution of verts - way too many verts on the hands, feet and tip of tail and not enough on the face. As a rough guide - the quads on the body should be of similar size everywhere with slight decrease in density in the arms and legs and increases in density at the hands, feet, joints (elbows, armpits & shoulders, knees, etc) and have about double to 3 times the quad-density on the face.
Don’t model with a subdivision surface modifier - keep it low poly and and get the proportions right first, and then move on to a multi-rez modifier for details.
Looks like you’ve elected for a very difficult and tedious workflow - personally would do a low-poly block-out into a meduim-poly sculpt into a retopology into a multirez.
Sounds like more work, but it actually goes quicker, the end-result will look better, and the final base-mesh will have way fewer verts. Check out Grant Abbitt’s tutorials to see examples of some other work-flows.
Also remember that if you want to add fur later to add a triangulate modifier before the particle system - hair-interpolation doesn’t work well on quads, it needs tris.
This proves to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that I don’t know how to do character modeling properly. I don’t even know how to sculpt, or at least how to go about it properly.
The vertex density thing was an eye-opener in particular. As was the triangulate modifier before particle system. Do the automated retopology tools work effectively, or do I need to learn that too?
I used the skin modifier to generate the initial basemesh, is that not something I should have done?
Don’t be hard on yourself - its not easy and one can always improve.
Depends - if it is a background asset or static model that you do not intend to animate, then yeah, sure… if it is a main-character or a game-export - then the remesh tools generally don’t cut it and you need to do manual-retopology anyway.
I often use the skin modifier for my block-outs which I will use as the starting-point for the rough-sculpt. I’ll never use it for my base-meshes tho.
Good to know that I’m not entirely useless at this. Joking aside, the skin modifier is fantastic, but now that I know not to use it as the basemesh, that’s not what I’m gonna do anymore.
Yes, its unavoidable… but only for the rough sculpts when the detail is pretty low.
The Constant-detail setting and Detail-flood-fill are your friends. Have the statistics on to keep an eye on vert counts… depending on your system, you generally don’t want to go above a quarter million verts during this step. Delete the rough-sculpt and have the file number incremented after you’ve done the re-topo step to keep file-size down.
You don’t touch dyntopo when doing multirez sculpting.
Edit: Just wanted to add, you can skip dyntopo and “sculpt” your low-poly model - but this does require at lot of experience and finesse and generally assumes you have a solid base-mesh to start off on, so would not recommend in your case.
With the workflow we’re discussing that’s irrelevant, since dyntopo alters the poly-count. In my example the rough sculpt had about 200k verts and the retopo has around 2k verts. A “low-poly” game asset’s vert-limit is dictated by the developer but can range from anywhere between 500 verts to 20k verts.
Check out Grant’s sculpting tutorials for a better idea of what work-flows are possible.
Okay, I tried this twice, got weird results both times. First on a cat thing I made, fur just got really thin. Now, on a human character’s head hair, I get this…
delete the hair data if you’re adding a triangulate after-the-fact… should be done before you groom or you’ll have to groom again. Effect only noticeable if you’re using child-interpolation.
Oh well! XD Something to learn I guess. 
