Roguedevelopmentdiary

Rogue Development Diary

Tutorial by Lee 'almighty_gir' Devonald

Week 1

Week one started with a bang. We all got together on Google+ (something I was sceptical about... I’m not a social networking fan) but actually it has some AMAZING features. Screen sharing is just mindblowingly fantastic even if it’s in its infancy and lacks some features. I’d strongly recommend it to anyone considering a collaborative project.

This week consists of choosing our girl, collecting reference, and... Drawing. Emphasis here on drawing. I’m not a fan at all; I think I suck at drawing which makes me not want to draw which has led to it being a self fulfilled prophecy! I don’t practice because I think I suck and because I don’t practice I DO suck! But that’s okay! This isn’t a drawing master class and truth be told I totally understand the reasoning behind the drawing part of this exercise.

When top artists tell you to try drawing your subject before you model them it’s to help you become more intimate with the subject, to see it from more angles than you may already have and more importantly it actually helps you to find out things you might have missed at a cursory glance. There are quite a few things I picked up drawing Rogue that I would have missed if I didn’t do it. The relationship between the shoulders and hips, the elongation of the torso... these are things you can make a guess at by looking at pictures, but when you start to draw the character you quickly understand how they’re exaggerated, and how easy it would be to go too far and make it all wrong!

It’s at this point I’m going to introduce you guys to a couple of things. I don’t really have a massive concept bible. Instead I focused on a single fantastic reference. This would be my primary sheet, the one I use when all else fails.

   Creating a nice strong loop from just above the nostril, to the chin, this goes around the mouth completely. If you want to know why, go look in the mirror and open your mouth as wide as you can. You’ll see the line I’m talking about!
   Creating loops around the eyes can “seem” like a pain, but only if you’re trying to force detail in. Remember this mesh is for sculpting... vertices will get pulled and pushed around all over the place. As long as your topology is nice and clean, it will hold up in your sculpt. It’s easier to move a vertex into a new position while maintaining your good loop structure, than it is to have to deal with bad topology and the sculpting issues that follow.
   Nice loops around the lips. Remember that the lips do NOT end in a point at their corners, when the mouth is open it should make a nice O shape, no poles, no triangles, and no excuses!
   Some nice loops around the ear can’t hurt. They help to support a nice even topology within the ear itself. This is one area of my base mesh where anatomy is almost entirely forgotten in favour of even topology... I’d rather sculpt the inner ear completely than try to model it and have to worry about topology.

Hopefully if you’re looking to build a base mesh and you keep these things in mind, you’ll have a finished product that will hold up well in sculpting, and will serve as a half decent guide at the same time. Remember that a lot of these loops are placed according to muscle structure, so when you come to sculpting you’ll find less resistance along those lines, and more resistance along lines which aren’t supported anatomically.

The Body

Here is where things can be quite interesting. I decided to keep a largely even polygon distribution so as to make sculpting easier, but at the same time try to include loops around areas which would have naturally high definition.