Low poly human

hey turkeyplague, good start so far.its 2am so i wont go into much detail [:)].

about the proportions, the arms are a bit short, the wrist should reach down to the crotch and the elbow should be around belly-button height from what i know.

im still learning myself, but i have a couple nuggets of wisdom that i can pass on concerning low poly mesh flow. for starters your mesh should be more evenly spaced out (itll help with unwrapping and rigging), you have more detail in the feet than you do in the characters chest, you shouldnt be afraid to terminate some of those edges into triangles above the knee and put the polies youve gained into the chest. the ears also have too much detail for this poly count, a good texture on a flat plane will do the job and look fine.

concerning the face: dont have a single vert in the corner of a characters mouth, unless you want him to talk like pac-man.

check out http://www.bobotheseal.com/ for inspiration, his work is good and there's also a bunch of links to other equally impressive artists in the extras page

p.s, i hope i didnt sound like an arse, im sleep deprived [|)]

My only suggestion is that in his head try to push the cheek bone out a bit more by moving the verts under his eye's out a bit and mabey pull his jaw in a bit more so it come down to a wierd U shape.
Also pull the vert that is at the bottom of the ear Upwards to try and get that ear lobe thnigy happening [:)]

Only a suggestion others may think diffrent.

But keep going with it its a good start!!!

Thanks. Some good suggestions there. I've started making some of the changes.

A couple of issues though:

I've taken a look at the mouth, moved some vertices around and it doesn't look like it will suffer from pacman syndrome. I took a look at the work on http://www.bobotheseal.com/ but those meshes seem to end the edges of the lips with vertices in a similar way to mine. Maybe I'm missing something?

[IMG]http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c35/nightmareturkey/human_screen07.jp…]

As far as ears go, I thought completely replacing them with a plane was a bit of a drastic step, although I have cut some of the detail from them. I tried to make ear lobes my pulling down the vertices like what Bob said, but unless I add more polys to them I'll get those hideous shadows that result from faces intersecting on sharp 90 degree angles. How do more advanced games like Doom3 work around this problem? I hear that even normal mapped meshes suffer when faces intersect to sharply.

Sure is quite around here. Anyway, I started mucking around with hair and clothing today and thought I'd post my progress.

[IMG]http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c35/nightmareturkey/human_screen08.jp…]

[IMG]http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c35/nightmareturkey/human_screen09.jp…]

quote:Originally posted by turkeyplague

...A couple of issues though:

I've taken a look at the mouth, moved some vertices around and it doesn't look like it will suffer from pacman syndrome. I took a look at the work on http://www.bobotheseal.com/ but those meshes seem to end the edges of the lips with vertices in a similar way to mine. Maybe I'm missing something?

This is just something dictated by the asset budget and what it's used for - ending at a single point we call it shovel mouth, and that's fine if it's not going to be put through a whole heap of verbal gymnastics. However if it's needing fully articulated phonemes to communicate subtle expression and a full range of lip synch then the curvature of the muzzle into the mouth should be structured like the underlaying facial muscles, which include points overlap on the mouth corners that loop into the internal mouth sock. If it only needs to show basic movement and/or talk like a muppet then only basic geometry is needed.

quote:Originally posted by turkeyplague

As far as ears go, I thought completely replacing them with a plane was a bit of a drastic step, although I have cut some of the detail from them. I tried to make ear lobes my pulling down the vertices like what Bob said, but unless I add more polys to them I'll get those hideous shadows that result from faces intersecting on sharp 90 degree angles. How do more advanced games like Doom3 work around this problem? I hear that even normal mapped meshes suffer when faces intersect to sharply.

As for the ears, at the moment the whole character is looking a bit plastic wrapped -- you should aim less for an approximation of what you're modelling and concentrate more on how it actually is in the real world. Ears are thin, and bucket out with a sharp connection at the back. Yours look plastic wrapped, or melted out onto the head. The hideous lighting artifacts are all due to the lighting model being limited to per-normal vertex lit and at the moment you're using only one smoothing group so those normals are completely averaged over the entire mesh.

Laymans terms, introduce hard edging to the lighting by learning to use smoothing groups.

More advanced engines like doom3 use normal maps to light on a per-pixel basis, so each texel on the mesh is a normal in and of itself, instead of having normals limited to vertices. In other words, the lighting is based off the texture instead of completely off the mesh. I'd suggest concentrating on pure geometry and get a firm grounding in that before you graduate to that however.

http://www.jistyles.com/content/resources/helpers/orc_prog01.jpg

the image above is from a series of progressions I've posted on my site of an orc character I did a few months back - his head is less geometry than the amount you've used, but notice I've used smoothing groups to seperate hard ridges like the mouth and nose, the muzzle and cheeks, and areas of the ear. This effectively eliminates lighting issues.

I hope this stuff helps you out, keep on going, and definitely grab some photo referance for proportions - it's pretty easy to find some, even if you use Da Vinci's vitruvian man

Thanks for the help so far guys. I've gone ahead and rigged it, UV mapped it, and started on the textures. I still have quite alot of work to do and have things to go back and fix, but I thought I'd post my progress since I'm starting to get towards that finished stage.

I decided against normal mapping and went with using plain textures and smoothing groups.

[IMG]http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c35/nightmareturkey/screeny.jpg[/IMG]

ha very cool looking design, has a bit of a incredibles feel to it. cooky cartoon style and all that, well done