First full freehand figure

[Cadmium77]

Up till now I’ve only been monkeying around with ZBrush, focusing my work on Maya. ZBrush is tough for me. I tend to just do little sketches in it. This time I was fiddling around with a hand model in Maya with polygons and smooth preview. I added on an arm, duplicated it and flipped it. added a cylinder for a torso then wound up extruding a head from that . I started on the 26th and this is how far I’ve gotten. Basically this is a Maya mesh created with Zbrush modeling in mind. I didn’t do any tracing or set up any reference photos in the Maya windows. It’s straight freehand with a bit of referencing to an anatomy text I’ve got. I prefer working free hand to tracing. Tracing just isn’t as much fun or as satisfying to me, even though sometimes it’s necessary. Next, the legs and feet. I’m also starting to build the inside of the mouth for this one; I went out in the snow to get some groceries for dinner and I was thinking about how I’d build teh gums and insert the teeth. I want to go all the way with this one…I even want to get to the point where I’m giving it fully rendered skin in Mental Ray and realistic hair. I’ve been reading and doing tutorials and hovering around teh Zbrush/Maya workflow for some time now and just wanting it so bad but it’s elusive. Seeing all the great work posted on Zbrush is both inspiring but it’s intimidating too. There’s a lot to learn. It’s fun once you get over your reluctance to fail…

Now that I can get this far with a work it’s firing me up to start seriously planning on rigging him up with a skeleton and start arranging his limbs using Maya Muscle too…

The Zbrush work has just begun on this one. Who knows, maybe I’ll even wind up retopologizing him and then slapping a normal map of the high res version in Mental Ray…but for now I’m just really pleased that I was able to build a subD topology in Maya that ZBrush didn’t reject because I had some ngons or triangles in it. I cannot beleive how much stuff you have to learn to be proficient in 3d graphics. It’s tough. The more I learn about it the more respect I have for the guys who have mastered it all.

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[Cadmium77]

I wasn’t too happy with the proportions as I started adding the legs so I quickly downloaded Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man and tweaked it out a bit, pulling up the shoulders and arms and stretching out the thighs.

Yes, I’ll be getting to ZBrush, but I like making solid meshes to work on in the manner of the old ZBrush 2 Gnomon Digital Sculpting Human Anatomy video.

http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/dvds/zpe01.html

Hey, whaddya know, that was a Zack Petroc video. :lol:

When it comes to human anatomy and Zbrush it’s pretty hard to get away from Zack…

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[Cadmium77]

I wasn’t at all satisfied with my topology…the edge loops sucked frankly. It was crude box modeling for the most part. So with the help of Joojaa over at Highend 3d forum I made my almost completed subD mesh live and then used the Create Polygon and Append To Polygon tools to draw a new polygon mesh on top of the old mesh. Retopology, Maya style.

The result was a much better mesh that allowed and encouraged more anatoimical study.

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[pgarcia]

I wasn’t at all satisfied with my topology…the edge loops sucked frankly. It was crude box modeling for the most part. So with the help of Joojaa over at Highend 3d forum I made my almost completed subD mesh live and then used the Create Polygon and Append To Polygon tools to draw a new polygon mesh on top of the old mesh. Retopology, Maya style.

The result was a much better mesh that allowed and encouraged more anatoimical study.

Cadmium77,

The mesh looks great. I am a novice in Maya. Could you explain (maybe a quick tut) the “…I made my almost completed subD mesh live and then used the Create Polygon and Append To Polygon tools to draw a new polygon mesh on top of the old mesh…” I understand the Create Polygon and Append to Polygon tools but not sure how you got your mesh.

thanks,

Paul

[Cadmium77]

Yeah, I’d love to. Say you make a rough model, but you hate the topology in it. It’s a real mess and it’s too hard to fix it by deleting edges and inserting new edges. Like my mess on the first go round there.

So what you do is you take your original model and you click on it so it's lit up green in OBJECT MODE. Then (your whole menu is in POLYGONS); if you'll look at my screen shots in the upper right hand corner of maya you'll see that little white window with POLYGON menu mode. Then on the top menu, under MODIFY, you'll see on the drop down menu the MAKE LIVE command. Hit that and your model will turn a dull green. You won't be able to tweak it's edges or vertices or faces or anything. It's "live" that is you can do different stuff than you normally can. You could paint fur or hair on it or grass but you don't want to do that. You want to draw polygons on it. So go ahead; Go to the MESH drop down menu and hit CREATE POLYGON TOOL and draw a polygon on your old model's mesh. It'll stick to the model surface that's gone "live". or once you've got a polygon drawn on to it got to the EDIT MESH drop down menu and find the APPEND TO POLYGON TOOL. If neither tool is working proplerly hit the box next to those two commands and when the little command window opens hit the RESET button to put them back in their normal state so you can start drawing quads on your old messy mesh that's not good enough for transferring into ZBrush. Now you can start working on your edge loops and making sure they're laid out to allow for the smooth formation of muscle groups and underlying bones in your model. The way I'm TRYING to do as a mere novice.

I just learned how to do this three days ago by the way. :lol: It makes such trippy colours. It’s better than drugs…
http://www.et.byu.edu/~csharp2/#A_SubD

I"m going all over the web trying to find stuff on edge loops and subD modeling. Here's my other thread on this over at HighEnd 3d with JooJaa, who's trying to help me. He's given me some good advice. Any advice from the pros would be welcome over here. [http://www.highend3d.com/boards/index.php?showtopic=252055](http://www.highend3d.com/boards/index.php?showtopic=252055) Also, start going around Google Images and collect anatomy pictures of different details of the human body for reference. The thing that's making this difficult is that I'm trying to learn the ins and outs of anatomy as I learn the game of edge looping with subDs. It's a bit crazy. Oh yeah and one other thing; when you're modeling in Maya with polygons, don't forget the 1, 2 and 3 keys. 1 is straight polygons, 2 is the smoothed subD Catmul Clarke surface with it's rigid polygonal scaffolding, and 3 is simply the smoothed subD surface.

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[pgarcia]

Wow, alot of info to digest. thanks. I will try the Maya technique. I am still wading through it all. The high end 3d thread is great. The subdivisionmodeling.com discussion is over my head right now. I am going to have to read that a couple times. I think I will start with modeling the ogre head on Highend3d.

http://www.highend3d.com/maya/tutorials/modeling/polygon/Dave-Ks-Poly-Head-Modeling-Tutorial-303.html

and Thanks again for posting your work. great stuff.

Paul

[Cadmium77]

Yeah, that ogre’s head is a good one to emulate.

* * * * *

When I was retopologizing the hand, I thought it would be cool to emulate a lot of other subD modelers and do an extrusion on all the knuckle joints to make a rise for the wrinkles there. Looked pretty good in Maya but when transferred into ZBrush it created some unpleasant artifacting at the corners of the extrusions that only got worse when I applied smoothing, like they were getting pinched.

The five edged poles at the wrist aren’t faring much better either. Nasty little pin points sticking up ruining the otherwise untroubled mesh.

The knuckle extrusion artifacts will be easy to get rid of. I don’t quite know what to do with the wrist ones though. Those poles are sort of required there right now. I can’t see how to get rid of them as I reduce the number of edges leading back to the forearm at those poles.

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