Learning Character Stuff?

SnaFuBAR

So, I started with a base mesh that I made, which is all in quads, so I can export it to mudbox for sculpting.



I started piecing together parts like shoulder pauldrons, boots, and the vest from the patent patterns.



I feel like I've been staring at it for too long and could really use the knowledge of you people that figured this out before me. What way should I be arranging my meshes to convey bend and compression wrinkles? Could the good bros and ladies around throw some wireframes or anything in my direction?

Carl Brannstrom

You want the quads to be as uniform and square as possible. It's going to be a hell to sculpt the shoulder and chest area.

A blocky, uniform basemesh is better than a detailed, uneven one.

SnaFuBAR

After I even up the quads, can anyone suggest an approach to modeling clothing?

Saman

You can use the sculpt tool(available in both maya and max) to smooth out the surface. That way you can get rid of the areas which look unnecessary tight with polygons(like the shoulders and the stomach).
For the clothes you could just duplicate your mesh, scale it up and then erase the parts which you won't need(you delete the hands, head and legs for a shirt and so on).
I suggest using Zbrush or mudbox to sculpt the wrinkles and stuff on the clothes but that's probably in a later phase.

Ravenok

With clothing I usually just get the basemesh into Zbrush, sculpt it, and get it out. I sometimes retopo it too, and optimize it to include folds and such with the least amount of resolution possible, but that's less necessary for non-game models.

You base mesh (as carl said) will be hard to sculpt on. You need an even flow of polygons, try to make them all the same size.