Low Poly Male Human

mpintar

This is my first post here on poly count, and one thing I can say is that all your game art here is inspiring.

I have previous experience modeling in 3d, but Low poly is a new frontier for me. Recently I have been working on a male body character mesh that will be used as a base mesh for creating characters off of. Since I have very little experience modeling low poly characters I thought the best option was to post my progress and get you guys to critique my work, and perhaps give me advice on the way I should lay out my edges on the mesh.

I am aiming for the final mesh to be about 500-600 triangles. Right now the mesh is sitting at 266 tris. Right now I know I need work around the joints, as this is particular hard for me right now. Also I am having trouble with the groin area. The characters built off of this base mesh will be used in an RTS game.

I wanted to post this mesh early before I got to far ahead of myself.






Any help that you can give me is greatly appreciated. I can't wait start learning from this community.

achmedthesnake

mpintar - I have a few suggestions -

Since the target in the end would be a rts (so a unit with animations), i'd primarily concentrate upon creatign a unique and recognisable silohette, for ease of identification when your viewing the model in that rts isometric/45% veiw (cnc3/comapny of heroes). i.e -

http://www.achmedthesnake.com/images/mrbubbles02.gif

also as i'm not sure about your engine specs and the different unit classes, but you could possibly avoid some mesh/deformation problems by having separate elements/limbs
- i recall some old unreal tournament chars had massive sholder pads which enabled the artists to have the arm as a seperate piece,and i'm preety sure cnc3 units are too (like the predator tank's body/turret/tracks)

secondly, i agree with you - the joint areas for the elbows/sholders/knees/groin need to have a little more geometry for deformation - mesh looks clean, so far so good mate!

sorry about the rant.

mpintar

Thanks for the tips. I will be working on creating unique silhouettes as soon as I actually go into the individual character creation. But thanks for the reminder. I think getting the silhouettes will be hard especially for and RTS game. right now I just want a good base shape with good mesh that i can then create characters from.

We are actually developing our own engine for this game. This game is actually for a school project, so as a team we decided on developing our own game engine on top of the XNA framework. We found that it will give us the most freedom compared to torque or another engine like that.

Thanks for the idea of sperating elements of the body. I know that most of our characters will have armour or robes, so that makes a lot of sense for deformation, as well as keeping the poly count low.

How would you go about grouping all the seperate elements for rigging and texturing? Do you just combine all the meshes together with them overlapping and then rig/texture animate?

I changed a few small things about the mesh. When I was looking at the side view I felt that the shape was not right, so I got a different reference image and shaped the mesh around that. I think it looks a bit more balanced now. Also I added some more tris around the shoulder area, but I am not sure how it will deform yet.

mpintar

Been working on the mesh a bit more. Got the head done. I am thinking that the head may be a little to high poly, so I may reduce that in the future. The groin area was reworked a bit, but I think I am going to rework it once more. The hand needs to be redone as I am not quite happy the way they turned out.

The entire mesh is sitting at 516 tris.