Good job smoothing out those strongly defined areas. Models looking great now. I can’t fine anything else to complain about xD
I’ve begun the body Re-topo. I’m quite happy with the torso’s topology right now (Gotta give credit to Johnathan Williamson for his lessons here. Definitely helped me out a couple times). I stated to do the shoulder, but I realized I messed up a bit on the sculpt. I think the place where the pectoral muscle meets the deltoid muscle is placed a bit low at the moment (See previous posts), and as a result, the shoulder is a bit thick vertically. This may become an issue when rigging and animating, so I think i’m going to try to fix that before I do any more above work on and above the chest.
As always, some progress pics:
As you can see, it’s a lot more dense than JW’s reference, and a bit more complicated, but I think it’ll deform correctly. I’m really loving the new (at least to me) sculpt-retopo workflow. I’d never have been able to make a mesh like this by pushing and pulling verts manually.
Looking good but yeah, I would definitely fix Those arm deltoids first. That will come back to bite you later when you rig her. Other than that she looks sweet. Nice lines and topo.
I find Johnathan’s videos to be very helpful. I’m glad he is putting out the mojo.
Wow, it’s been a while since I worked on this. School plus a number of other interests really sucked away my time.
I’m still working on the body re-topo, and I finally got a nice block of time to sit down and just work on it. Here’s where it’s at right now.
Looks kinda off without the arms. Much of the topology is once again based off the Sintelcharacter, as I know for a fact it’s been used well for animation. If there are any riggers and animators out there, do you see any potential issues in my mesh when it comes to deformation, rigging and animating?
The knees, both front and back, aren’t finished. The topology needs to be better than just a tube, and I need to fix the back of the knee in the sculpt anyway. I’ve been looking at a few more references, and I noticed I have it backwards. Those two tendons aren’t visible with the legs extended like that, but rather a single larger bulge appears at the back of the knee. I’m going to fix that later, though it’s not going to be as visible under the leggings.
Critiques and comments are of course still welcome. Everything’s shrinkwrapped to the sculpt, so I can still make minor edits to that.
That’s looking really good, I like your work.
I also did the JW tutorial, but for the life of me I couldn’t get the deforming to look good no matter how much I tweaked and weight painted the model. I ended up scrapping the entire thing and just did a from scratch box model which worked much better for deforming my model.
With that said, I am interested in seeing how you set up your armature and weights on this model. Are you going to post those progress shots?
I’m going to post just about everything, I think. This thread is more or less documenting the project for both my benefit and the benefit or anyone who thinks I’m doing something right and might want to imitate it (Fair warning guys, I’m an amateur and pretty much completely self taught. Copy at own risk!)
I’m not looking forward to rigging. Weight painting is tedious and isn’t easy at all. Another problem, especially with a high-density model is making vertices stretch between bones rather than just rotate and move with them. The armpit is the worst when it comes to this. Every rig I’ve made, and most people’s early rigged characters I’ve seen, have really strange deformation in the armpit when the arm is at the character’s side. I’m hoping the A-pose rather than the T-pose will help alleviate this problem. Additionally, I may not be weighting the model directly but using a mesh-deform modifier instead. I still have to figure out how that works with rigging, and I’m likely going to have to watch Lee Salvemini’s rigging tutorials some more. Hopefully it’s not too outdated.
Not a huge update, but I did a little work on the knees and added in the arms and did the elbow topology.
Sorry about just doing screenshots. I’m too tired tonight to bother making the nice OpenGL renders.
The elbow is once again an imitation of what Sintel had. I liked how it accented the dip just above the joint with that edge-loop. The knee topology is pretty simple, but better than a simple tube. I wanted to accent the kneecap a bit better. The vertex count is 20 for the leg rings and 14 for the arm. Still a bit dense, but not terrible. Keeping the count even is the most important thing if you’re going to stick with all quads.
The hands are next, and I’m not looking forward to them. Unfortunately, looking back on my past characters, there’s nothing there I can re-use that’s really any good. Looks like I’m going to have to learn to do it properly. Does anyone have any tips on making hands?
That’s it for tonight.
Just found this thread, and awesome, awesome, awesome. As a female, looking at a lot of the female models in games and modelling tutorials is off-putting for me. I never used to notice as much, but nowadays… sigh.
Incidentally, these feelings spurred me to undertake a project to remodel a character I made two years ago in uni… And this time around I wanted to give her serious curves in retaliation 
Great stuff, going to follow this.
And I’m back…
Been working on the hands, which is half the reason I’ve taken so long (Hands scare me). The other half is just general busyness, finals, graduation, moving, etc.
Anyway, some pics as always.
This was all done without sculpting, just the old fashioned way. I’m fairly happy with it. Most will be covered by the glove, but it makes for a fairly realistic shrinkwrap target.
The topology is based on the sintel model and this model here, which I guess is in turn based on the blenderella character. It was the best I could find and while complicated, the topology made a lot of sense. It does contain a few 6-sided poles, but the result wasn’t bad, so I’m going to leave it.
I may relax the fingers later.
Worked on the clothing last night. It’s beginning to read pretty well, though I still need the gloves and a few other details to really convey the character I want.
As always, comments and suggestions are always welcome!
Can’t Complain… nothing bad so far… :yes:
Haha, so far…
Another quick update. Nothing crazy new, just blocking in some of the other details I was missing before. She looks a lot more tough and prepared now.
Does anyone have any experience modeling and rigging layers of clothing? You’ll notice the 2 layers on the chest. Will there be clipping issues when I go to rig it? Are there ways I can prevent it during the modeling stage?
Again, any critiques, comments, suggestions, whatever are always appreciated.
Clothing is a pain in the neck, basically what I would advice is keep the topology of the clothes close to the topology of the body, so when you rig it the weight-points will be similar, thus moving the clothes along with the body.
It’s not fool proof, clothing is hard to animate, even for us professionals here.
Cheers,
jim
Thanks for the suggestion. I’m going to be masking off the parts of the body that aren’t shown, so I won’t have to worry about that. I’m more concerned about the light blue undershirt poking through the brown outer clothing. I don’t think it’s going to be a huge issue, but I think keeping the topology and placement similar will help. Now that I’ve done the boots, I’m also worried about weird deformations there as well. We’ll see.
This girl looks like she could really kick ass with those boots 
I faced the same issue with Gena as she still has her body underneath her clothes (I wanted to see if I could skin the clothing well enough to do so). In keeping the topology of the body and clothes similar, the weight transfers worked quite well and only required some manual tweaking in places. I’ve found having a belt (that has to move with the body to avoid intersections) is very problematic, especially if it’s meant to be something stiff that should hold its shape. I’m interested to see how it all goes when you get to skinning 
After another extended break, I’m back. Did some more work on the boots and gloves, including some multi-res sculpting for the wrinkles.
I like it, good to see that you are back!
You are an excellent modeler. Your topology is top-notch. Keep it going!
I agree with others, you are an excellent modeller, and I wish I could get things even half as clear and clean as your topo. My only complaint is the strappy attire. It’s become something of a cliche in my mind, but even this is handled well here with a harmonic pallet that doesn’t over-emphasize it. It all flows well visually and stylistically, even if the strappy, buckled stuff isn’t really my thing.