Roguedevelopmentdiary

Rogue Development Diary

Tutorial by Lee 'almighty_gir' Devonald

Week 2

Now, the course at this point takes a wider scope... weeks 2, 3, and 4 are actually joined at the hip. They focus on making a base mesh, blocking out, and sculpting.

I built a base mesh during week 1, while sketching. I wanted to stay a little ahead of the curve if possible, and I LOVE sculpting. So getting into that part of it as early as possible was a must for me.

Anyway! Rambling aside this is how I went about building my base mesh.

The Head

I wanted to keep it quads where possible. This is a good rule to follow when you’re looking at sculpting, too many triangles and even too many “poles” (vertices which share more than four faces) can give you an inconsistent smoothing result which is obviously not a good thing. That said, my mesh has a couple of poles here and there, and two triangles... well, two in “prominent locations” anyway.

I had originally intended the head of the mesh to be as plain as possible... pretty much a subdivided cube attached to a neck. But then I also wanted to practice my topology, so ended up making a head with edge loops and such. No truly defined features where possible, but still decent topology. So when making the head I focused hard on clearly defining these loops:

• 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.

• Pectoral – Bicep transition. This line would be present in a male character and in actuality, would be far easier to produce. But alas, women have breasts, and in this case they got in the way somewhat! The line would normally trace the lowest part of the pectoral, up to the deltoid, and down the bicep. But in the case of a woman I thought it should trace naturally around the breast instead of the pectoral. Notice also how the breast is largely formed of a sphere and merged into the topology of the chest.
• A clear area of definition for high definition is the connection of the neck muscles to the clavicles. The clavicles themselves tend to be fairly well defined on slim and muscular people, but the neck muscles themselves can tend to protrude slightly.
• Twisting the edges from the elbow to the wrist can really help when it comes to sculpting the arm muscles. They naturally twist this direction on the forearm which can help reduce resistance when sculpting.
• Belly button! An entirely optional thing. It can really help to find the “centre” of your character by defining their belly early on.
• Defining the knee like this can be very helpful, like the belly button it is a natural centre for the legs and is one of the most defined areas on the human body.
• Here’s another area where you can keep a fairly even polygon distribution but also help to define a muscle group; this one is the transition between the latissimus dorsi and the trapezius.
• Depending on how well defined you want your character; this set of loops can really help sell the triceps, the humorous, and the elbow.
• This loop is introduced to help define the shoulder blade (scapula).
• This loop serves a dual purpose. Firstly it forms a great terminator for an edge loop that comes over the top of the skull... there were just too many loops to let them go across the body! And secondly it allows for definition of the neck muscles.

As you can see, I put some effort into keeping as even a distribution as possible, whilst trying to define some key areas.

The Zbrush

And the final stage was to create suitable polygroups in Zbrush.