Female Topology help

Tom Ellis

Hey there all.

I'm not sure if this should be in TT, P&P or WAYWO, so apologies in advance if I put it in the wrong one.

Anyone who read my last blog post, erm... Polycount post, will know I'm fighting a losing battle with myself about whether I should focus on trying to become a Character Artist or an Environment Artist.

After thinking about it, my heart is in character art, but I suck at it. Hard. So I'm trying to improve my skills and working on a little character idea.

I'm having major topology issues, I've looked at a lot of images, notably the great thread over on GA which has plenty of shots of decent edge flow. The problem is, I see great edge flow, but I can't replicate it.

So here's my best effort... how's it looking? Ok? Don't give up your day job? Close Max and never open it again?

It is a base mesh to be sculpted but I figured I'd try to get a good edge flow and topology to a) make sculpting nicer around muscle groups, and b) work on my body modeling skills.

Ignore the actual polycount, I'm aiming for all quads and even distribution.

Crits / paintovers / moral support is all very welcome right now!

Thanks.

Tom Ellis

EDIT: Here's the concept...the mask will be extracted in ZBrush and the mouth wont be modelled, which explains the lack of one on the base mesh.

Tom Ellis

Cheers Perna.

Aww characters are hard!

The worrying thing is, I've been to two courses of life drawing anatomy classes over the last couple of years, I've got at least 4 books on anatomy and artist anatomy on my bookshelf, and I've done quite a few form / value sketches, ecorch

Calabi

Personally I think base meshs are becoming obsolete, just use sculptris and pull the forms out of a sphere, or even zbrush(forget zspheres two I think they are more work), pull out from a sphere and reproject and decimate like that guys workflow on here said.

Its more freedom, to move and pull things around that way.

Tom Ellis

Yeah I agree for sure Calabi, while I'm not experienced in an indutry position to comment on how little base meshes are created in a production environment, I know they seem to be used much less on peoples personal work.

For most of my previous characters I have done the base solely using ZSpheres. As I said though, the two reasons for this one was to define muscle flow prior to sculpting as I find you get nicer results when sculpting certain areas, such as the face around the eyes etc. Although it's obviously entirely possible to sculpt fantastic results from nothing but a sphere as many decent ZBrush users will illustrate.

Mainly though, it was just to practice my skills.

Yeah Perna that's awesome thanks a lot, always great to get some in-depth advice from people who've 'gone through the motions' so to speak.

Rick Stirling

I'm with Per here, you need to concentrate more on the shapes than the topology at this point. Getting to know the shapes and functions will help you learn the topology. You've got far too much geo, and you are not concentrating on any one area.

I did a Google image search for basemesh and this was the first one in the list:



Artists site: http://jang-rana.blogspot.com/

There are 2 things to notice about this model - the nicely defined shapes and the low Polycount. If you were to concentrate on getting the large masses of your model correct you'd progress much faster.

Tom Ellis

Ah bollocks to character art... who am I kidding, I'm destined to be an environment artist.

When I've got people in the industry saying things like 'your environment work shows a lot of promise' and other industry pro's saying 'you have a lot to learn about anatomy, go study etc'... it seems insane to even explore the character route further.

I'm gonna drop character art all together, I'm making no progress whereas I seem to be getting somewhere with env stuff.

Anyway, as mentioned in another thread, I need to talk less and post more art.