Modeling People

Are you going to be animating this person?

Yes.

Bump...

I was hoping someone would answer this who has more experience with modeling people but me. But since no one has...

I would say model it in parts - for one thing you're going to want them to partially overlap each other, like the shoulder joint should be a ball attached to the top of the upper arm which is partially submerged in the torso.

Really, what you want to do is create a stick figure, rig and animate it, see what problems you have animating it and adjust the stick figure to make the animation work well, then add detail to the stick figure until it looks like a person. Or maybe you could buy or find a free person which was already rigged and partially animated, and you could analyze that to learn about where they put the bones and things.

i was also hoping someone with more experience would answer this since i am only an envionmental artist, but i have modeled characters before.
there are a couple ways you can model a human.
1.)polygonal, you create the character mesh from the ground up, adding faces as you go. after you have your general shape you go back and refine the details.
2.)box model, here you take a simple primitive shape and add/subtract vertices and mold the mesh to fit your needed shape.
both methods work well and depend on an artist's preference, i prefer to start with cylinders and box model the human. i usually make each arm, torso, legs, and head seperatly. however you want your final model to have as few pieces as possible, and depending on your need have the mesh in one piece. meaning, for games you generally want the human to be one complete mesh, and use one complete texture for the entire mesh (and perhaps seperate textures for accessories). there is also spline modeling, but i never seen this method used for a complete human, only faces so far. and if you're sub-dividing you'll want to keep everything in quads (four sided) so you can get a clean sub-divide. also, don't go overboard with sub division, molding the basic shape and then sub dividing it like crazy won't produce a good mesh! that and it increases your tri quite fast. and since you're using blender i can't give you any specific help as you model, so hopefully someone else here can.

Thanks for the help. I've found the best way for me is to get a reference picture then do what you two said.

The box modeling way:

Modelingtutorial Joan of Arc

The cheat way:

Makehuman

In the end:

Whatever gets the job done. Boxmodeling, Poly By Poly, Sculpting, remodeling a Makehuman mesh. etc. . Don't even try to model it in one piece. You will get mad. Split it into body pieces to model. First model a hand, a foot, the torso, ... . And then union the parts together once you are done with the pieces.

Important for animations are the edgeloops. Wrong edgeloopflow and your mesh will deform wrong. Important is also the rig. Dependand of your bones system. That's the part which needs experience. Unfortunately no software around that raises your experience. You have to do it the hard way: make them :P

Not sure if i would want to model with Blender though. No N-gons means no quads. Gives you surely a hard time because of the edgeloops ...

Quote:

Original post by tiles The box modeling way: Modelingtutorial Joan of Arc The cheat way: Makehuman In the end: Whatever gets the job done. Boxmodeling, Poly By Poly, Sculpting, remodeling a Makehuman mesh. etc. . Don't even try to model it in one piece. You will get mad. Split it into body pieces to model. First model a hand, a foot, the torso, ... . And then union the parts together once you are done with the pieces. Important for animations are the edgeloops. Wrong edgeloopflow and your mesh will deform wrong. Important is also the rig. Dependand of your bones system. That's the part which needs experience. Unfortunately no software around that raises your experience. You have to do it the hard way: make them :P Not sure if i would want to model with Blender though. No N-gons means no quads. Gives you surely a hard time because of the edgeloops ...

yeah i forgot to mention the importance of edgeloops, good mesh flow and well placed edgeloops in very important for correct deformation when animating.
as for make human, its rather useless unless you have a lot of nudes running around. only reason is that you'll have to alter the mesh so much to fit for clothing and lower its polycount that in the end it may be too hacked up to use. although i have no doubt a good artist could do this, but if you're a good artist you wouldn't use makehuman in the first place.

[Edited by - Jarrod1937 on January 12, 2007 9:54:43 AM]

I have used Makehuman for one mesh so far. Has saved me some days to model from scratch. So it isn't completely useless. It was simply faster. But every timesaver also has its price. Makehuman proportions are a bit too realistic for my flavour. And you cannot get completely rid off of this look. It's the same with Poser meshes. You will always notice that it is a Poser Mesh.

That's why I prefer to model from scratch, which gives me even more control. Makehuman is also nothing for low poly gamemodels. Too much polys. And there is no Makeanimal. So you better know how to model ;)

Quote:

Original post by tiles I have used Makehuman for one mesh so far. Has saved me some days to model from scratch. So it isn't completely useless. It was simply faster. But every timesaver also has its price. Makehuman proportions are a bit too realistic for my flavour. And you cannot get completely rid off of this look. It's the same with Poser meshes. You will always notice that it is a Poser Mesh. That's why I prefer to model from scratch, which gives me even more control. Makehuman is also nothing for low poly gamemodels. Too much polys. And there is no Makeanimal. So you better know how to model ;)

can i see a screenshot? if it produces good results perhaps i'll give it a try in the future, i'm always open to time savers.

Not really. I produce small isometric Bitmap sprites in size of 96x96. You wouldn't see anything useful from this thumbnailsized pictures ;)

But have a look at yourself. Here a vampire where i have used a Makehuman mesh to go on with modeling:



And here a from scratch modeled cook sprite:



I would download Makehuman and have a look by yourself. Isn`t that big ;)