Low poly character modeling

I’m working on a character for a somewhat game-styled project. Since this is my first somewhat serious project, I’d like some feedback on the modelling, especially on the face. I wanted it to be fairly low-poly to keep with the style, but still possible to animate expressively. Also some feedback on whether it will animate well would be nice.




the thighs seem a little long relative to the lower leg.
(edit) also, you could collapse some of the edge loops on the back of the head behind the ear to conserve a few more polygons.

The legs are much too long, especially the upper section. The proportions in general are just incorrect. It looks more like a robot at this point.

I don’t really know how to put this gently, but your topology is WAY off, especially in the face. I highly recommend this series here that goes over the basics of proper topology.
Polycount also goes over topology pretty well. They show some good low-poly game asset examples there as well. Scroll down to the bottom of that page to see all the categories. You can probably see that there is no one correct solution, but I will say there are a lot more wrong solutions.

What you have so far can probably work as a decent base, but it’s going to have to be re-worked in a number of places. First thing to do though is get a better understanding of human anatomy and proportions. This will go a long way towards making it look correct. Look at traditional drawing and anatomy references. And model on top of reference images. This will help A LOT!

Put simply, character modeling is hard; much harder than just about anything else. I’m no expert on it myself, but I feel it’s a rewarding challenge. Your first character is NOT going to be great, so don’t get discourages. You’re only going to get better by trying again and again.

Sorry, I don’t want this to seem harsh, and I don’t want to discourage you. I Just want you to understand what all is involved.

Good luck!

Yeah, that is true^

To that I want to add: look at some of the wireframes from games you play. Skyrim, for example, uses some pretty hi-res meshes in comparison to what you’ve made (you can see the wireframes in most game editors, or using the console ingame). The best thing to do is start hi-poly and then remesh. (Game artists often sculpt a character at upwards of a million polygons and then retopologise it, and bake the details of the hires onto the lo-res using xNormal).

Thanks all of you! This is very helpful, and not at all too harsh. I’ll keep this in mind and try to rework the character.

Haven’t had much time to work on this yet, but here’s an attempt at retopology. How does it look?


It’s definitely a lot better than the first one now. Unless you’re going for an extremely low poly model, I’d put some more detail into the nose. At the moment the nose is just part of a square grid running through the cheeks and up from the mouth. Try something like this to get a more realistic form to the nose.

I’d highly reccomend Jonathan Williamson’s human head tutorial. It’s quite long, but it takes you step by step through the whole process and gives you a good topology to work with. It really helped me when I was first learning to model heads.

Thanks! I am going for a fairly low poly model, but I tried to add some loops to the nose anyway. I’m going to adjust the shape and such later, because right now I’ve just got a retopo mesh shrinkwrapped to the original one, which is also why it looks a bit weird in places. Here’s a nearly finished retopo of the head:



Working on retopo on the front of the torso. The proportions haven’t been fixed yet; for now I’m focusing on getting decent topology. Thoughts?


More or less finished with the torso. Again, the proportions and such are not final, I’d rather have feedback on the topology at this point. Also, I’m uncertain about whether this thread still fits into Focused Critique, since it’s become more of a WIP thread, would it be better to move it there?