Hello! I’m trying to refine my very first Blender project “Harse” by redoing the topology. Currently trying to keep it low to mid poly, so subdivision isn’t an option.
Right now I’m trying to do two things - refine the nose and refine the shoulder. The nose is too low poly and the shoulder isn’t anatomically accurate, but there are load bearing edge loops i can’t just remove. Most if not all of the nose loops come from the mouth, and while the shoulder area could probably use more geometry i have no idea where to add it and not clutter everything up. Advice, thoughts?
Rubberducking wins again! Inspiration hit right after i posted and i managed to fix up the shoulder area. Shoulders are now correct and edge flow is smoother, added in a bit more geometry to give the forelegs some degree of seperation from the chest and its looking a lot better
Redid the nose area, finally. Had to make another edge loop along the mouth, then reposition everything, and finally decided to add another loop along the outside of the nostril to give it a bit more definition. Might finally be ready to model the inner mouth!
No pictures right now but I decided to compare Harse against actual horses with proper conformation and it falls short. SO! Tomorrow will be trying to get this animal to match general conformation standards- adjusting the shoulder angle, leg position, back length, the angle of the head and neck… loads of fun!
Its just past 4 in the morning and I managed to get my horse to mostly fit Ideal Conformation- at least in the broad sense. Pretty sure I messed up the hooves, and i feel like the ratio of spine to barrel isn’t quite how I want it- but I was at this all morning in a frenzy and now I want to SLEEP.
If there’s any equestrians reading this, feel free to critique away! I love getting input from Actual Horse Riders ^-^
First, I grew up with horses, rode them, and my mother bred them. I have a lot of experience around horses.
First (part 2!), your geometry looks great. I love efficient quad modeling!
Next, my initial thought was something about the model looked off…
But here’s the thing… overlaying the outline of a real horse on top of your image makes it appear as if the proportions are within the realm of possibility from the side view. But keep in mind the photo has perspective and your side view is in orthographic view which can significantly alter the appearance of things.
Unless I am modeling hard surface shapes and things that are going to be mirrored, I always model with perspective and I think it’s important to do so. Why? Because humans see things with perspective and we intuitively look at things as if they have perspective.
What looks correct in orthographic view can be wildly distorted looking with perspective.
Now there are all kinds of horse breeds and they come in different shapes and sizes. That said, in looking at your first image (and you’ve likely made loads of progress and tweaks since then), it appears as if the muzzle is a bit on the narrow side and the ears are not quite large enough.
But, and this is a big but, it’s really hard to tell because looking at things orthographically isn’t natural for the human brain and it automatically translates it to having perspective.
So further analysis would really require some perspective views.
That said, if you’re off, it doesn’t look like it would take much to fix it. Especially with your clean geometry.
First off, holy shit THANK YOU for the in depth response! Feedback is greatly appreciated
With that said here’s Project Harse as seen from the side, front, rear and above, plus closeups of the head. I could go back and add in conformation images of actual horses, but I was going off a list of “ideal things to look for” since it seemed that every horse I looked at only had a single image taken from the side.
Thank you for the additional reference… these are sort of helpful in judging proportion (and especially helpful when modeling from straight on views with little/no perspective), but it would be really helpful to also see a perspective view from any angle that isn’t directly facing one of the sides. Bonus points if you use a 50mm focal length because that is roughly the same as how humans see the world.
Examples:
Notice how one of these is a side view, but it isn’t directly facing the side as your images are. It is above and looking down. This helps one judge perspective. And if I were to critique my own work right now, I’d say it looks like the back of the fox’s head doesn’t come out enough. But this is a year old work-in-progress and I haven’t looked at it with fresh eyes until just now.
One thing that might also help you judge proportion is searching for “accurate horse anatomy”. Not only will it provide you with some cool reference images, it will also show you the underlying structure of the horse so you have an idea of what you’re actually modeling… or what the shapes of the horse are actually a result of.
Hammered out some better legs. I had to add slightly more edge loops to get the musculature exactly how i wanted it, but these look loads nicer
Need to figure out a proper angle for my fetlocks and pasterns next. Sources say anything in between 40 to 55 degree angles- and I’m stuck staring at really shitty, crusty jpegs of horse hoof outlines to find the “ideal”.
lowered the neck, fixed up it’s shape and tweaked the head a little bit- thinner nose bridge AND now it has a proper chin! I need to stop griping about getting the withers/chest/armpit angle exactly right or else I’ll be making minute tweaks until summer -_-
In other news I want to try and rig this. I’ve been putting it off because of the horrors of weight painting, and bone placement, and everything else that comes with adding a skeleton to mesh
Stopping here for now, but I tweaked the ears and made a version with a thicker upper lip. Question is, are thicker upper lips a common “at rest” look regardless of breed, or does it depend on the type [draft, pony, etc?]
I still need to redo the inner mouth! [fuck my life]
but beyond the inner mouth and agonizing over the lips I THINK i’m finally ready to rig- saying this for the 50th time while i fine tune the model YET AGAIN
Major-ish update… I’m modeling the inner mouth! Decided to go as low poly as i could without compromising on shape, because the detail is going to be in the materials and the mouth isn’t the focus anyway. Here is how it looks inside the head so far
I need to figure out how to make a decent lowpoly tongue, somehow add in a set of proper canine/fighting teeth AND decide exactly how I want the mouth to connect to the face. Having the inner lip as part of the head mesh rather than the mouth certainly looks better- now how far back to model the tongue, should I connect it to the rest of the mouth or let it float free, what’s the best way to model the canines without having to add in a thousand edge loops, etc
Putting off rigging and weight painting cause it’s scary, but in the meantime have a comparison between Project Harse [in pink] and a lower poly version [in blue] of the same model!
The base of the ears was cut down to only one edge loop holding it to the head, the nose and lips were severely trimmed down but kept their shape as best I could
The chest and legs were also reworked, though thankfully the latter only needed slight repositioning as opposed to completely new edge flow. Not gonna lie I kinda like the lowpoly legs better?
Lastly, the rear, which I’m not happy about but have no clue on how to look good while also being lowpoly, and trying to correctly follow muscle flow- which neither models really manage.
So I refined the legs, from the fetlocks down! Only to realize they weren’t angled properly, so I adjusted that- and now, going by various hoof conformation images and articles the axis is broken. Any ideas on how to get the angle fixed because I’ve been staring at this for over an hour. I could move the fetlocks lower but they’re already pretty low and it seems doing so again would squish them?? Or I’d end up trying to adjust the angle again, with a horse that has weak, sloping pasterns
I said “fuck it, good enough” and moved on to a very rough, basic rig to see how the model moves! Learned I need to adjust the bone placement better, but here is Project Harse
