Hello everyone,
I am very new here, just registered moments ago after being referred to here by a friend. In brief, I'm an artist, a fresh grad with a BA in digital animation, hoping to make it into the CG business some day. Just wanted to get to know people in the field, get some critiques, and check out some of the cool art people are making. For starters, I'm currently working on a character, a heroic female for a next gen type video game. I plan to keep the count a decent level (10,000 right now, trying to knock it down more) and the mesh generic for now to use in future projects. I do plan to use the mesh in Zbrush so some of the tris and face density changes were causing me some concern...
Anyway, here are some screen caps:
I thank you guys in advance for critiques!
Replies
I see simply too many areas to mention where you can take the count down, but try to just start going through and removing loops everywhere. Really small loops like around the nipple are way overkill and I am not even sure if they help.
Tri count aside, the transition from the bottom of the eye socket and around the eyes in general are off. It looks like she doesn't have eyelids at the moment. The butt area is okay if it is like that to fit in jeans or something, but as a nude model there isn't any real crack area. I'm not sure what's going on with the hands or feet, I can't see them so well. the meshflow on the knee is weird. It doesn't really make it look like a knee ATM. Also, the way the eyeballs are set right now they appear to be facing outward in either direction.
As a second thought, using this as a base mesh for sculpting might be fine, but you will have to make sure you convert it entirely to all quads.
Is this a cartoon and/or stylized character? Right now, her proportions are very exaggerated more like a Barbie doll than a real life human.
The good:
What I really like though is how you set up the hair from the start. I see people all the time not put hair on there female models which makes them look horrible most the time. Also, you definitely have a very feminine look going. If you were trying to make her look appealing, you certainly were successful there. Your overall mesh flow is quite good. If you used less tri's, however; you would probably find it way more manageable, and making it all quads easier as well.
All in all, its a really good start, I hope you don't take any of the advice as a harsh crit because you really want to get these sort of things out of the way in the beginning phases.
Some workflow advice:
I would suggest you convert this model to all quads and work on a high poly sculpt. When you have her looking the way you want, take her back into your 3d app. and build a proper low poly. Shoot for around 4-6 thousand tri's if she is nude, and you should have more than enough polys to play with. Just focus on the silhouette and add a extra loop or two on areas that would bend and deform when she is animated.
You could check out Ben Mathis's Delilah series tutorials if you have any concerns about sticking to that tri count, or any question in general. It's pretty much the go to place for free and awesome tutorials.
Keep us updated with your progress, and welcome to Polycount!
ok little proportion aid, your torso needs to be bigger in every direction, legs are too long even for a comic book "heroic" type character as is. also the arms are too bulky for a female even a jacked one, especially considering the torso your character wouldn't be able to hold them up. the face isnt exactly average either, but its within the realm of possibility for a real person so it dosnt bother me much.
also try and avoid modeling in T pose on future models, it causes tricky to paint shoulder deformations if your gonna skin and animate this.
if you want to upload the mesh file i use maya also i could tweak some stuff and send it back to ya. Gl on your next stages! will be following
-Woog
Some additional questions I had in response to the crits:
1. Is it a better practice to create two versions of the mesh, one for the actual rigging / animation and another optimized for hi-poly sculpt apps? I suppose I can get by with an even lower count but that would generate more tris and uneven faces, so maybe better to have a sculpt app friendly version as well (provided that you have the UV's done already, which is the case for this model)
2. Are density differences in parts of the mesh that bad? I've noticed certain areas of meshes inevitably become dense to maintain its silhouette (in my example, the face, particularly the nose and mouth / zygomatic loop area), and I have noticed that this does cause odd artifacts in sculpt apps. I've dealt with this by hiking up the division level in the sculpt app; is this a bad practice?
apologizes in advance if some of these sculpt app questions are newbie, I never got formal training in Zbrush and pretty much learned it on my own.
PS, try to have an even spread of loops and subdivisions, ideal would to have each face equally sized, that way, all detail will be....equally detailed.