Bethany Black (wip) Critiques welcome

KristaW

So this is a sculpt that I made for zbrush class last quarter and I am going to retop her and make her into a game character.
Bethany Black is a character form the comic book Strange Girl, which I highly recommend!! I had to make some judgement calls with how to remake her being that as a comic book character her form could change on the whim of an issue or a different artist. I feel like the biggest consistency that I saw with her, especially with Eric Nguyen's depictions, was the repetition of triangles.Here is the reference sheet that I based her off of.


Here is a posed version of her that I turned in for class but I wasn't satisfied with the result because her geometry got real chewed up when posing her. I made the mistake of dynameshing all the way until she was 4 million points and I spent a couple days resurrecting her anatomy from a chewed bubble gum look.


I've gone back to an earlier ztool at this point before I posed her and refined her features. I will post that ztool below

KristaW

Fixed her up enough to start retop. I made the hands bigger because they were a little too petite, pushed and pulled the scale of several body parts, and tried to push the triangular shapes a little more.

Uraani

This is all i could spot, otherwise the model looks awesome.
I didn't sugarcoat the comments.

KristaW

@Uraani, thanks for the feedback! I was trying to stylize Bethany's figure into triangles but I don't think I pushed the stylization enough to make it believable and unified. Right now she is hanging in this weird realm between stylized and realistic. It's harder to do stylization then I previously thought. I'm not sure if I should try to push the stylization further to make it more obvious (like making her butt and chest even more triangular as well as her face and hair) or if I should retract and push her to be more realistic.

KristaW

So here is my messy topology plan. I've built a couple base meshes before but I have never retoped an entire character. I went back and forth about her tank top being separate geometry and decided in the end to make it a separate piece since it pulls away from the chest and between the breasts and on the strap as well. Also she doesn't have a crazy amount of accessories so I figure I would spend the poly's on a tank top mesh. I figured I would just do her long hair as alpha cards. If anyone thinks that is a bad idea for long hair let me know. It's not too late. As always, critiques are welcome.

CaptainRoku

The biggest issue I am having here is that your version looks nothing like the ref art you posted. I can obviously draw similarities between the characters because of things like hair style and outfit, but I am more referring to over all body shape and facial structure. The ref images all seem like a female of slight Asian descent, your model looks Norwegian or northern European. I think for this to be a really strong piece you should really push the character to look more like the reference image. Dont worry about stylizing her or making her realistic, just make her look like your compiled ref and you will be golden.

AtticusMars

Is the retopo for the low poly or the high poly model?

Either way you're overthinking your topology here, it's better to keep your topology with straight edge loops and cut in additional edges where you need them.

This is a really high res example but you should get the idea:

http://area.autodesk.com/userdata/image/inhouse/w/4a527-b3xij-2a32s-7u75t.jpg

If this is your high poly then you should try to keep your quads square and minimize poles which your current topology plan has tons of.

For a low poly model, unless the character needs to have a replaceable outfit I wouldn't ever suggest modeling clothing separate if it is supposed to cling to the body like a shirt. It's wasteful and just increases the likelyhood you'll have intersections while animating. Especially if the topology of the shirt is very different from the topology of the torso.

I'd suggest revisiting your sculpt and trying to refine your shapes better, especially the face (which is sloped at an angle right now) arms and pants

KristaW

@CaptainRoku, Thanks for the feedback! I have definitely struggled with trying to look at fluxuating shapes and styles of this character in order to nail down the major commonalities found through her many looks. I obviously haven't nailed that down yet and I will reassess what makes Bethany Black look like Bethany Black. I never thought of Bethany Black as having asian features but I can see that now that you have mentioned it.

@AtticusMars, Thanks for the link and for the great advice with the tank top. I've never animated one of my own characters before so I probably would have learned that the hard way if you hadn't mentioned it Both you and CaptainRoku have mentioned going back and revising the sculpt before jumping into retoping so I will do that first.

Hopefully I will post some progress soon if school doesn't keep me to busy.

KristaW

So I made several snips of my character along side reference and I think these two revision sheets sum up what I noted in all of them. If I'm missing something obvious let me know! I can't believe I didn't involve her demon collar in the original sculpt it looks like a lot of fun to sculpt.