Hi quality, low poly people project

[spudmonkey]

OK, so, I've decided that I'm going to go for it and try to break into the industry again. Some of you may remember my last attempt in 1999 when everything was SF-A, which failed because everything was mid-project and the one job I was offered would have left me homeless due to the low salary!

So, I looked at my 1999 portfolio and by criminy does it ever suck! There's some good stuff there, but it's amazing how poor most of it looks when it used to look so good.

New portfolio time then! Some of my more recent stuff will be going into it, but the building, texturing and possibly animating of new things will be vital. To this end, I'm also diversifying as the old portfolio was heavy on sci-fi though the better stuff was most definitely my real world models.

This is the first model, which I was working on at 4am (insomnia is sometimes a good thing!). I've made a couple of attempts at a head, but none of them are really satisfying yet. Poly count is 650-700 at the moment, though this is not optimised and the joints aren't fully anim tested yet.

Please, please, please let me know what you think about it, especially the style and proportions, especially if you think it sucks or have spotted some weak points!

Ta!

Nick

http://www.perversonality.com/realtime/rt_man_01_frnt_f.jpg

http://www.perversonality.com/realtime/rt_man_01_back_e.jpg

[Proximo]

I love it. He seems to have quite a lot of character already, wihtout a head. :D Can I see a wireframe? I'm interested in improving my own character modelling skills so seeing something like this might give me a few clues.

[spudmonkey]

Yep, you sure can, though I'm off to the pub this evening so you may have to wait a day or two!

The wireframe will show the work that needs doing around the joints but won't really show how I made it. It's a Max 5 model, created as an editable poly which allowed me use "extrude along a spline" for the arms and legs, "cut" to shape the chest plus standard extrudes with vertex and edge manipulation.

I might, given time, create a mini tutorial on how to do this, which would probably be more useful.

I also built the mesh so it could be meshsmoothed without distorting it too much in case I needed a high poly version... This is the result without changing any of the weighting:

http://www.perversonality.com/realtime/rt_man_01_smth_f.jpg

Smoothed is around 1,500-1,800 polys and so would be useable in UT2003 amongst other titles...

[Bogdan]

Looking nice. Can you make it more realistic and not so cartoon like?
When do you think you will make the tutorial?

[spudmonkey]

Originally posted by Bogdan
Looking nice. Can you make it more realistic and not so cartoon like?
When do you think you will make the tutorial?

Simple answer is yes, I could, but I kinda like the cartoon style. It would simply be a case of pulling the vertices around until the proportions were more realistic.

As for the tutorial, well, soonish! I will be at home this evening, though I may not have time to do too much.

[spudmonkey]

http://www.perversonality.com/realtime/rt_man_01_wire_f.jpg

and a link to a 2 sided wireframe render:

http://www.perversonality.com/realtime/rt_man_01_wire_g.jpg

[spudmonkey]

OK, so the additional work on the body is:

1. knee joints to minimise nasty mesh deformation when bending.

2. back joint for the same reason when bending forwards.

That should only add a small number of polygons and the actual count is a tiny 494 polys for that wireframe, though the head will add a lot more...

[spudmonkey]

A mini-tutorial on creating the legs in Max 5. This uses some Max 5 specific stuff but there are other ways of doing this which I will try to explain!

1. Create a sphere.

http://www.perversonality.com/realtime/tutorial/Image1.jpg

2. Convert to an editable poly and remove a load of polygons!

http://www.perversonality.com/realtime/tutorial/Image2.jpg

3. Create a spline (complex so far, eh?!)

http://www.perversonality.com/realtime/tutorial/Image3.jpg

4. Select the polys that will be the top of the leg (hip joint if you will).

http://www.perversonality.com/realtime/tutorial/Image4.jpg

5. First of the Max 5 only bits - Extrude along Spline. I messed about with taper to get the bell-bottom trousers effect. The non-Max5 way to do this would be to extrude once, move, rotate and position, then extrude again - this speeds things up and makes a smoother line.

http://www.perversonality.com/realtime/tutorial/Image5.jpg

6. The final part is to add a smooth modifier and then a symmetry modifier. Symmetry has a threshold value that welds the two halves together, proveded the edges are within the specified distance.

http://www.perversonality.com/realtime/tutorial/Image6.jpg

From sphere to trousers in a minute or two! You can then insert and extrude the bottom to create the shoes, extrude the top to create the upper body and use a similar Extrude Along Spline method to create the arms. Then you are back into the realms of vertex manipulation, cut, refine and edge turning to flesh out the body, create the fingers and so on.

The biggest benefit of this method is you can build the splines first for the arms, legs and torso so that you have accurate proportions before you start building the model. A stick man!

[spudmonkey]

1182 polys in total without optimising. Not bad at all really. The head might need some more work, but I think I will try texturing it first to see if I can get away with it as it is...

http://www.perversonality.com/realtime/rt_man_01_frnt_i.jpg

http://www.perversonality.com/realtime/rt_man_01_back_i.jpg

[spudmonkey]

I created some low poly models for a game a long, long time ago and the head of one of the characters, Brice, turned out rather well, so I've reused the texture to test the quality of the head. This is the result:

http://www.perversonality.com/realtime/rt_man_01_txtr_a.jpg

This is a rough-and-ready job as I've not used the proper UVW mapping that the final model will have. Texture size is 128x128 pixels, which is 1/16th of the 512x512 bitmap which will be the models only texture...

[Proximo]

Impressive. :D

[Chris B]

good job there, spud.

hope to see it fisihed whe i return from liz in a couple of days :D

[spudmonkey]

Me, finish something? It could happen I suppose ;)