Could someone please provide feedback on my topology?

stephenq80

Hello, thanks for reading my post.

I am currently in the process of retopologizing a torso piece and will want to animate it later. I have not done this before and was hoping that someone could take a look at my topology and let me know if it will animate properly. The animations will need to be smooth and realistic.

I have inserted some images below.





Thank you very much for any feedback.

JohannesAg

Don´t forget to use a smooth brush to even out your topo, there is too much difference in size of quads right now. Flipped normals did some nice videos on retopo that you can find on their youtube page, if you´ve never done this before my advice would be to take an hour to watch those and then get back to it.

rollin

Usually you should not try not to mimic the muscle flows with your edge loops. A more stupid but even grid gives often better deformation results and is easier to weight and generally to work with

vavavoom

I'm also retopoing a sculpt, thought i'd share my approach see if it's helpful and also if it has problems.

This was to get a tidier sculpt base than my initial dynamesh I started out with after i'd got to a good enough point.

As I know, if you're retoping from a completed sculpt and the retopo is for baking onto, animating, making into a lower poly game model, you can use triangles which will give you more freedom to get the shape looking nice and also make the topology geared toward deformation for animating.

However, If you are still sculpting and want a base to move up and down sub division levels, it's gotta be quads spaced out relatively evenly, as previous guys mentioned.

Hope it's helpful~~

vavavoom

Just realized, you want topolgy advice for animating... not sculpting, so my what I wrote in my previous post is not really relevant.

Here's a good reference from the polycount wiki that gives 2 approaches. They are super low poly but the forms/flow can still be applied to higher poly models I think.

stephenq80

Thank you so much for the feedback everyone. I appreciated it. The reason I went with the pattern that I did is because when I checked online for information, I saw a ton of pictures and there was always some kind of pattern, typically, what looked like two intersecting "U" shapes such as the one below.


The information at this site: http://www.cgmascot.com/design/modeling-for-animation-body/ also mentions that intersecting U pattern to be used to help with deformation. The only time that I read/saw simply edge loops used like the ones mentioned by vavavoom is on VERY low poly (basically toon/stick figure) type models (which mine wont be).

@rollin, you mentioned to NOT follow the muscle pattern, but to instead use simple, even grid pattern, would something like the one below animation just fine? 



Thank you!

rollin

Yes, esp. if you aim for such high polycount / dense poly distribution. It gives you way more even weight painting options and it's also better for displacement if you're using it.