Main Character Chick

animatr

hello! this is a girl I'm working on for a FPS here at uni. I'm going to be taking here into zbrush later on. But for now, here she is, at 3500 tris, and a knife that will have a separate mesh container at 114 tris. (knife is in a sheath on the back)

The game is a sound based FPS called resonator, so that huge thing on her arm is the "resonator" gun. There will probably be a dedicated site later on that i could link to. Anyways, any comments, crits, suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Rick Stirling

There are more angles than 90 degree angels - at the moment practically every polygon in your model is a perfect rectangle. You can use less polygons to make the same shapes if you start to make them work for you.

Here is an old tutorial that I wrote. I hope that it can help you little in this aspect.

http://tutorials.rsart.co.uk/tutorials/efficient/index.shtml

My next point is that it lacks a certain amount of volume - typically on a human you can see areas of mass, like the thighs are seperate from the calves simply in how the muscles bulge and then come in at the knee. However, on your model the leg is basically just a straight tube. Look further, it is angled out from the pelvis, but then come vertically down, giving it a bandy legged look, like a cowboy or a well used whore.

Also, the generall proportions are slightly off - the boddy is slightly too long and the arms too short - see where the hands stop? they should be lower down the leg. With arms straight down by your sides, the bottom of the armpit is only slightly higher than the nipples (on a man), the elbow is at the same height as the belly button, the wrist is at the crotch and the hands reach almost halfway down the thighs.

animatr

thanks for the feedback. I agree with you about the arms. Will fix that. As far as the square modeling, I looked it over and see no real areas that could use that sort of tweaking. I tried to keep even topology for the zbrushing and as square shapes as possible for that same reason. Also, the main body proportions/placement was taken from some image ref from 3d.sk, and she uh, may be one of the things mentioned above;), but I can tweak that.

Rick Stirling

You don't need to worry about an even topology for Zbrush as such. The reason for using angles is that it more closely mimics the curves of the human body. Ditch those stright lines and think of the curves baby!

There is some nice poly flow here:

http://www.capcom-central.com/concept/re4/LeonWireFrame.jpg

All those horizontal lines across the body and legs could so easily be curved. For the upper body, follthe shape around the chest and ribcage, use the edgeflow to be the edges of the masses, like groin, abdomen, chest, shoulders, nech etc.

This is old, but have look at the horizontal edges on the chest.




Also, this older sketch may help, showing the curves following areas of the body:

Rick Stirling

Ah, just in case there are crossed wires about Z-brush, yes you DO want it to be mostly QUADS, but you dont need it to be rectangles.

KDR_11k

For example, the stomach area could use one edgeloop instead of two. Some of the loops on the gun can be terminated early (you don't need to keep quads so cut edges where the definition is needed and weld them where it isn't). The horizontal center loop around the shoulders doesn't need to cross the torso. The loops that round the breasts don't need to run around the torso.

Obviously the "you don't need quads" bit doesn't apply to the part you ship off to ZBrush, that needs 100% quads and a pretty even poly distribution.

Rick Stirling

The zbrush bit doesn't need even poly distribution at all - you just want to make sure there are enough polygons in the areas you want to add the detail in. I usually subdivide certain areas on my mesh where I want more detail before I take it to Zbrush. This allows me to have enough polygons for super detail, without overloading the model with polygons that it doesn't need.

But so many people don't realise that while a rectangle is a quad, a quad is not necessarily a rectangle. Diamond shapes are still your friend.

What was the old mantra? "Diamonds over squares, diamonds over squares." It's still useful.

animatr

thanks for the advice. I can see what you mean now. It wsa hard to "read" in the first post. much easier to understand once i saw. Funny thing is, I modeled this character along side a gnomon dvd with mayan escalante entitled " body modeling for games"....go figure. thanks for your time again!

animatr

i just noticed rick...are you on a mac with max? if so...sweet! and how?

Rick Stirling

Nope, that was my PC with a Mac theme. I run Silo on my Mac.