Bipedal Cat WIP - Topology/Anatomy Advice?
polycounter lvl 7
Hey everyone, been plugging away at this model for a while now and I think I'm finally almost near the point of unwrapping and texturing it, just wanted to get some advice before I got onto that step in case there are any glading issues I hadn't concidered down the line. There are still a few places that need ironing out, and I'll address them as the images come up.
Just a beauty(?) shot first. No that's not a dick hanging down, that's the tail. :poly105:
Current wireframes. Parts that are still mostly WIP are the feet, shoulders/arms/hands, and a few problem areas I'm going to address next.
As you can see the shoulder area is still a mess. Where the tail joins with the mesh is a problem area I need to clean up, and I'm having issues with the torso having more edge rings then the lower legs, causing Tris like the one I circled in red where I stopped it from flowing further.
There are some poles on the hips/legs that could pose problems once I reach animation stage, but I'm not sure yet, I never really done animation before but as far as I know they could be placed better.
The face is almost mostly WIP so it isn't getting a lot of attention here, only question is do you think the ears should be double sided mesh, or would planes suffice with a two sided texture?
Just a beauty(?) shot first. No that's not a dick hanging down, that's the tail. :poly105:
Current wireframes. Parts that are still mostly WIP are the feet, shoulders/arms/hands, and a few problem areas I'm going to address next.
As you can see the shoulder area is still a mess. Where the tail joins with the mesh is a problem area I need to clean up, and I'm having issues with the torso having more edge rings then the lower legs, causing Tris like the one I circled in red where I stopped it from flowing further.
There are some poles on the hips/legs that could pose problems once I reach animation stage, but I'm not sure yet, I never really done animation before but as far as I know they could be placed better.
The face is almost mostly WIP so it isn't getting a lot of attention here, only question is do you think the ears should be double sided mesh, or would planes suffice with a two sided texture?
Replies
Anyway, if you're planning on rigging this for animation etc, you may want to change the topology in the arms so that they're able to bend without any funky deformations.
EDIT:
Cleaned up the shoulders and tail area immensely, probably going to work on the arms next. My biggest issue is mainly I feel like I have too many polygons that just don't serve a purpose where they are other then making sure other edge loops and flows are going the right way.
Had to revert to an earlier mesh for the chest, here's some changes so far
Excellent tutorial on how to do poly flow for low poly chars.
While I'm working on this I have some concerns I've never been able to address. I do all my work in 3DS Max and rarely bring my models into engines or anything so I don't have much experience with this, but if I wanted to make this model customizable to an extent, say like 2-4 tails and ears or various hair styles, how do I do this?
For tails they can't all be welded to the same spot, do I have to make several meshes each with a different tail? How would I swap them out? What if some tails are longer then others, would I need a skeletal rig the length of the longest tail and simply not bind the skin of the shorter tails to the skeleton bones that extend past the end? What if I wanted to animate the tip of the tail, I'd never know what length I was working with at the time?
This is all very confusing.
As for different tails, I'm not sure how to best to that. You could make some different tails and attach them to copies of your model, then you could copy the rig and weighting over to those different models and modify it as necessary. I've never tried anything like that though, so I really don't know ;P