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.