Sunday, January 10, 2010

It's Alive...!



... Alright - maybe not, but hey at least now I have a template of a male human body I can work off:



 

Picking up from where I left off last week, I started modeling the hip and the legs. Unlike my modeling odyssey when I was working on the arm, the hip and legs proved to be less troublesome than the arms thanks to the lessons learnt from the time spent modeling the arms.



After the hip and legs came the hands and feet. Figuring that the feet need less detail, I spent most of the time modeling the hand.


 

I was a bit confused when modeling the hand since... wait a minute, I've just noticed a 5-sided polygon on one of the above pictures. Hold on, be right back...



There, fixed. Anyhow, modeling the hand took quite a bit of time since, let's face it, it is quite complex (and God help me when I rig the resulting character...). With a bit of help from modeling and anatomy references, I finally managed to complete the hand. The only problem I face now is the fact that the hand alone has around 200+ polys - much more than I bargained for.

Overall, the whole body contains 1496 polygons - somewhat below my expectations, but at least it should give me some room should the time comes when I have to add polygons.

Anyway, that's it for this week - peace.

- D.T.

P.S. - Shoot, them legs look a little bit too long...

Saturday, January 2, 2010

The Arm is Connected to the...

Week 5

Before I begin to unload typing diarrhea, a happy belated new year to all those who happen to be reading this.

Okay, now that's out of the way this week has been quite productive as far as modeling a human body goes. So far I managed to produce a torso with the head and arms attached. Pictures of the model are shown below:



 
 
 



... Okay, it's not perfect. Although I tried to keep all polygons as quads, in the end I have to cut some corners and use a mixture of tris and quads or else the poly-count would end up being 1000+ instead of the current 590 poly-count that the torso has. A bit too high for a low-poly model but I'll keep on working on optimizing the mesh once I have the hips, legs, hands and feet sorted out.

So... onto the foil of my plans. Modeling the torso and attaching the head to it is all fine and dandy but when it came to modeling the arm... Heh, let's just say that it was a s*** fight when it comes to modeling accurate human anatomy.

This:



And this:

 

... were the reason why there was a s*** fight in the first place. My first attempt at the forearm ended up being scrapped due to my ignorance of human anatomy; so as a result I have to rip off the arm and replace it with a clone of the original arm model and start over again. However, partly due to the way I modeled the original arm, it proved difficult to properly add edge loops for the muscle definitions of the forearm, resulting in dodgy triangles that didn't help with my conquest of minimal polygons. While the elbow was less troublesome, the crook/joint of the arm ended up being simply edge-looped.

For the most scrutinizing, here's a closer look at the abdomen of the torso:



As some of you may have noticed I took some anatomical liberties when modeling the abdominal muscle groups - not to mention that since I was looking for a low poly count the model ended up with very peculiar looking edge-looping as I went in and merged a couple of vertices. I reckon that out of all the things I've done on this model, the only proper edge-loops I've done so far were the ones on the armpits...

... And just to give you guys an idea of what I've been through, here's a bonus picture:




Until next time~!

-D.T.