hand topology for animation

juanoblagu

hi everyone when i sculpted this hand i did a quick retopo in order to have a cleaner model and now that im cleaning everything up for baking and texturing i wanted to ask you if this is a good topology for animation in stylized characters, what do you guys think? 
many thanks in advance!

jacopoS

Hi,
it depends: are you making a game character or will it be rendered using an offline renderer?
Either way, I think your topology would do an ok job with deformations but I think it could be optimized one way or the other for your specific case.

juanoblagu

jacopoS said:

Hi,
it depends: are you making a game character or will it be rendered using an offline renderer?
Either way, I think your topology would do an ok job with deformations but I think it could be optimized one way or the other for your specific case.

i mainly want to apply for models for animation jobs, not video games. not saying i dont want to work on game characters but in this particular model im aiming for cinematics.

jacopoS

In this case, you might want to look for a simplier topology. You should try and minimize the number of non-standard vertex and get rid of triangles since once you apply CatmullClark, each triangle will generate one more non-standard vertex in it's center. If you have too many of those too close to each other, your geometry might start to look lumpy.

Something like the example below should work.

juanoblagu

jacopoS said:

In this case, you might want to look for a simplier topology. You should try and minimize the number of non-standard vertex and get rid of triangles since once you apply CatmullClark, each triangle will generate one more non-standard vertex in it's center. If you have too many of those too close to each other, your geometry might start to look lumpy.

Something like the example below should work.

wow man thank you very much for all this! im on it

jacopoS

No problem

juanoblagu

what do you think of this one? is it better?

jacopoS

Much better!
You could easely simplify the palm topology further by doing like in the example below:

This would reduce the number of poles by two, making that area less likely to become lumpy.

Also, for offline rendering, I think you would have better keeping the topology of the fingernails.

jStins

Some good ref here (good ref for articulation and topology for the rest of the body as well): http://www.hippydrome.com/ModelingHand.html