Saurian Beast (WIP)

Cortes

sup polycount. Here's a WIP I've been working on for the past week or so. A hulking, theropod berserker of sorts. References and concept are based around theropod dinosaurs like Allosaurus, Giganotosaurus and Ceratosaurus. However, he has some anthro anatomy in his design, especially the arms.

I've been collecting plenty of dinosaur images and have remodeled this creature's body numerous times before reaching this suitable base mesh result so far. I am going to take this mesh into zbrush to make my first sculpt. In zbrush I'll sculpt the surface detail and flesh out his musculature (references for dinosaur anatomy, specifically musculature, is harder to find than I thought). Afterwards I'll retopo and make a low poly.

Right now I'm looking for critique and advice for how to continue the anatomy of this base mesh. Right now his skeletal structure kind of has a hybrid of a theropod shoulder blade and a more anthro type shoulder. But the entire arm anatomy is still kind of nebulous. There are a number of options I've considered, such as making him able to carry a weapon, experimenting with what looks good, but I'm still not sure as to what the final result will be.

Here are the main proportions so far. Would it be recommended to model the base foot claws and hand claws in max or sculpt those in zbrush?

Cortes

The base mesh is completed. Anything to recommend I work on/fix before I take this into zb?

Will Faucher

Make your quads more evenly spaced out. It will help out ALOT.

Mark Dygert

If you're taking it into ZB you'll want quads that are roughly the same size and roughly square. That way when you sub-divide you don't have areas that are tightly packed and give you a lot of detail at lower levels, but then you have to keep subdividing to get the larger areas to a decent resolution.

It also looks like you went to great lengths to keep it all quads which lead to more tiny long quads. It's fine to use triangles, there are times they create pinch points but you can normally smooth those out or put them in places where it won't matter if you can't smooth it.

I would suggest reworking it so you get a consistent quad size, kind of like this:

Cortes

Awesome, thanks for the advice. Duly noted and will definitely work on making those changes. I think I focused so much on keeping quads that I didn't realize those very quads were so out of whack, lol. Should be an easy fix though. Mark, you may have noticed the tail looks kind of whacky topologically, but I actually used your own cool example for quad flow (in the T-Rex thread) to minimize all those edges flowing from the head. Is that the right idea, or should I just let all those edges flow as they are when I model the tail?

I'm sure there's tons I can do to optimize the edge flow, but from what I've read, you generally want to keep base meshes simple and rough, hence the cuts I made by the tail as you can see here. I also have no real idea yet of how much is actually possible in zbrush, but I'm starting to learn how much preparation is needed before you jump right in. There are lots of spikes and platey scales I want to add to this beast, and come to think of it, I can use all those extra edges to my advantage and should model them in the base mesh.

In the end, you really can never over-design and prepare these things, and since I want my first real atttempt at making an asset (I am going to make a low poly and rig thsi) to go smoothly, I will definitely follow your advice. Thanks!

Cortes

How's this? Too dense for a base mesh? around 11k polys. Tried retopo in 3d-coat and got around 8k tris. Is there a way to export a low poly quads-only mesh (isn't that what retopo is though?), or do you have to space out your quads by hand?

What I want to know is, is this a suitable base mesh for sculpting>low poly> rigging?
I can make this mesh animator friendly when I make the low poly, correct?

Or should I start over? Not a problem for me since now I have a clearer idea of what to do.

Mark Dygert

Cortes wrote: »

Mark, you may have noticed the tail looks kind of whacky topologically, but I actually used your own cool example for quad flow (in the T-Rex thread) to minimize all those edges flowing from the head. Is that the right idea, or should I just let all those edges flow as they are when I model the tail?

If I remember that thread correctly (there have been so many) that suggestion was more of a way to optimize a final mesh thats going in game, not really a base mesh thats going into a sculpting app. With a base mesh for sculpting, you're looking to knock in the base shape and get the quads evenly distributed so you have a consistent resolution across the entire mesh.

I would say you definitely need to quad up the tail, more like a cylinder with evenly sized quads and not worry about edge flow optimization tricks until later, when you're making the final low poly mesh, at least that's how I've seen a lot of people around here work, and do it that way myself.

Mark Dygert

Cortes wrote: »

How's this? Too dense for a base mesh?

I think its too dense and still has some tightly packed areas. This is about 1 or 2 subdivisions up from a standard base mesh that I would create. I normally stick to 500-3k polys (not tris) for base meshes, I toss a turbosmooth modifier on top to see how it will sub-divide. You can also use the tessellate and mesh smooth options in Edit poly but unlike a modifier you can just turn off or delete those options in edit poly have to be undone or they stick around.

Cortes wrote: »

What I want to know is, is this a suitable base mesh for sculpting>low poly> rigging?
I can make this mesh animator friendly when I make the low poly, correct?

Well typically the workflow goes something like this:
Create a base mesh, its not optimized, evenly quaded mesh that sub-divides well. You take this in and create a super high poly.
Export one of the lower levels of sub-division and using tools like Wrap-it, topogun or maybe even 3dcoat, you build your low poly around that lower level export. This becomes your animation friendly, fully optimized mesh.

I would shoot for a base that was about this dense:

Cortes

Again, thanks so much for the advice.

I think I am going to restart this from the beginning, from a nice, clean slate and get a much better mesh and end result than what I currently have now, which is better than going in and surgically removing all those extra edges and spending even more time on a mesh I'm not really satisfied with. I think what kills this mesh is its topology, something I tried to take care of but it didn't work out so well. However, it will be better the next time around.

All I aim for is improvement and so far I've been having a lot of fun. I'll post back here when I have something more substantial.