My Second ever 3D model!

No UV mapping yet, and given the headache that was to model the helmet, I may never get around to get it right for this model, but here it is! My second 3D model, and this time a humanoid (Megaman Zero from a reference I found on the web to be precise.)



Not sure if 1097 faces is way too much for this level of detail, but hey! My first humanoid!

 

Actually, awesome amount of faces, my ninja has just over 1k and has less detail than this, Awesome job, if you need help texturing I can help.

 

You have 1100 quads on 1/2 a mirrored mesh so that would be ~ 4400 triangles. The mesh in some areas is too dense - the hand is a good example. Try to describe the shape using less. I like the proportions and it is a great second try!

 

First of all, let me say good work for just getting started.

Now for some criticism that is meant to be constructive, please don't let it ruin your desire to 3D model.

This isn't a hard and fast rule, but you should try to keep your rows as evenly spaced as possible.
The arms look really good in this respect, but the legs and body have that pair of rows up the side that are too close together.
If they're that close, then either add those quads to the quads on one side or the other, or split that row between both sides.
There's also a lot of places where the rows widen and narrow drastically, when there doesn't seem to be any need for them to.

There's something very strange going on at the top seam of the helmet.

And at the front of the 'visor' part of the helmet, rework those faces so that they don't make a bunch of triangles going into a point, it's not needed there.
You can get the same result if that comes forward into a vertical line of quads. If you want a sharp-ish point, just use the four-way intersection of four quads.

 

I agree. Because this seems like more of an organic model I would suggest trying to avoid triangles. Work in quads and maintain proper topology. Which you have... Your model, especially for your second completed model is a fascinating glimpse into your natural ability. I suggest aligning your vertexes on the chest instead of having them stretch away from each other.

I see potential problems in the hand. The hand's face count is fine. It looks like you have triangles there though, Like if one vertices is joining 6 to 12 triangles. A potential issue may arise when trying to unwrap, and texture the model. Like Tasarran said, your faces are too close to one another in certain areas. Space them further apart. "try to keep your rows as evenly spaced as possible."

It also looks like you have intersecting faces. Where your face's edge goes up into the crown, or top part of your model's head. You also want to avoid this. When you're unwrapping, texturing, or sculpting meshes you don't want intersecting objects that are apart a single mesh. Separate meshes are fine because they can be uv mapped, and textured separately.

If it's necessary try and bridge/append two edges together. Or merge your vertices together where intersecting edges are but only if they are a part of a single mesh.

Added: You also have edges where there shouldn't be any edges. These end up adding more polygons than is necessary. It seems like these areas are the faces, or edges that are too close to one another as described. These can simply be deleted from the mesh. Their deletion would still preserve your model's detail while loosing those extra faces, reducing your poly count. That detail can be added back later during texturing, or sculpting. However I also suggest avoiding having 5 tri's per face. Deleting edges that follow along a continuous path need to be deleted if they don't seem to make sense. Deleting edges can cause problems like presenting you with 5 vertices for one or two faces.

I believe that is called a non-manifold topology error. In any case you should be able to delete any stray vertices to.

 

There are [intentional/noobish] triangles only at the sole of the shoes and the tip of the head (hidden under the helmet, helmet is a second mesh.)

(BTW, I'm starting my models with cylinders, their tops are always triangles... is that a bad thing? Should I start with cubes instead?)

Actually lie, the helm also has triangles, but because attempting to keep the entire helm as one single mesh was extremely hard. Was forced to use quite a few triangles at the top.

I did keep the lines on nearly even distance at first, actually started with a cylinder and just extruded from there.

The very nearby loops, I didn't realize it was bad but I only got them in when I started modeling certain spots of the shoes and the gloves that required more detail. The tutorial I saw had the guy making new loops for those cases so I figured that was the "right approach". The other option I could have thought off was to either locally split faces on the shoe, potentially creating triangles (i had already read thats a bad thing) or reorganize those lines once the loop was created. Given that the loop was created after the entire body was modeled... I figured I'd be lazy and just leave them there, even if they went wasted.

Is that a bad call on such a last minute loop creation?

 

Triangles in themselves are not bad, and people tend to overreact to them a lot, especially when they don't have a good level experience to tell them why they are bad - since most of the information you find on the web is simply "they are bad' - triangles are simply a problem when you are deforming the topology. It wont bend nicely and can make it harder to get the right results in animation. If you are going to have triangles, its ok, just make sure they are at points on the mesh that would not normally be deforming (especially bending, this is something you will learn with trial and error) - reason number 2 why triangles can be a problem is when moving your low poly mesh int a sculpting program (such as Z-Brush) you wont always get the results you want when you subdivide your model it will create additional and unneeded geomitry. However, a lot of the newer brushes on Zbrush pretty much ignore topology these days and let you get results no matter how clean your mesh is, so, primarily this then only becomes an Animation issue. Which should still not be ignored.

On the issue of evenly spaced loops - where your knees are on the legs, the primarily close together loops are fine. Every bendable joint should have 3 loops, 2 to deform the joint, and 1 to hold the shape, this will get you correct deformation for that (and also should be places where there are absolutely no triangles).

The reason a lot of people want you to keep your topology as evenly spaced as possible goes into 3d painting and skinning for animation (in some cases) for programs like zbrush, each quad region represents a space to paint on, and having large rectangle spaces means detail gets stretched and deformed. This is not the case if your doing 3d painting in photoshop, or even in 3ds max viewport as you'd be painting directly on the texture itself - having even topology however does help in both the animation process and in the sculpting process, but for low poly its not as big a deal, just make sure there are more squares than rectangles - sometimes having a triangle so you can avoid having long polygons is the best solution so don't be afraid to stick those in.

Extra loops are not good or bad, but a good rule of thumb is, if the loops or verts are not adding anything to keep the shape of the model or the detail you want present, remove it, when developing for mobile or some consoles your resources are pretty limited, and when your doing small props or things that might end up having thousands of in a scene, those extra geometry adds up a lot faster than you might realize.

 

Oh I forgot to mention, learn about smoothing groups, that will let you bring out a lot of detail for the hard surface places on that model.

 

wow for your very second 3d model that is very good.Now lets see some textures on that nice model you got there

 

larvantholos makes a great point on the following.

"On the issue of evenly spaced loops - where your knees are on the legs, the primarily close together loops are fine. Every bendable joint should have 3 loops, 2 to deform the joint, and 1 to hold the shape, this will get you correct deformation for that (and also should be places where there are absolutely no triangles)."

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I've always had trouble even when working entirely in quads with proper deformation. Adding edge loops to a model where it's necessary has helped me a lot.

 

Thanks for the feedback, everyone!

A few issues I got here I guess are in large part due to the reference I used. I decided to challenge mysel in a hypothetical situation were I was ordered to produce a model of some one's reference/design.

I did pick something I thought was simple, and started right at the waist ( the simplest piece.) I didn't plan ahead and didn't realize how many more loops I'd need for the gloves and boots (also why those parts are way more dense than the rest, I wanted to stay faithful to the design.)

I guess for the next tone I should start at the most comples sector first.

Btw on that 3 loops on joints rule... Is there harm of using higher loop counts in joints if it helps design? Like using perhaps 5 loops on a knee with a knee pad?

 

Just wanted to stop in and say nice job. Your second attempt? Definitely great potential.

 

Don't stress to much about how dense it is, you can always reduce the amount of loops now, and its a great exercise to learn how to fix your topology and optimize the model for production purposes definitely finish it, going from the model, through the texturing process, etc, is invaluable experience.

Technically speaking on the loops rule, there is no hard and face, 3 is the minimum to get proper deformation of that joint for animation. Generally speaking, you can get a lot of detail with very little, so as you model more, you'll begin to understand where to invest your time and resources, and where not to. Often times joints are an area where a little goes a long way, where as on a budget, you'd want to spend more time making your faces and hands have better detail/flexibility - this will of course vary a lot depending on the models your doing and their intended purposes.

 

Everyone already said all the criticism I was going to, so I'm just wanted to add how impressed I am with how this turned out.

 

You're making very good progress. Here's what struck me at first:

All of you edges are smooth. Vertex coloring will go a long way for that character, and where you have vertex color edges, multiple vertices will be required. However, I don't believe Blender will create hard edges in the normals (normals are used for lighting) just by having hard color edges. Correct me if I'm wrong on that; it would save some time for this project, but be undesirable in most cases. (Blender has never had good vertex coloring tools though, so I'm not counting out the possibility of it ruining normals.) Learn to use the Edge Split modifier. Use it on all of the edges that have a color transition in your reference. Even without color, you'll have a way more recognizable character.

Also, number of faces doesn't mean anything to performance. All you need to worry about is vertex count, which isn't in your screenshots. Blender will lie to you, as all modeling apps do; import the mesh to Unity for an accurate number. Hard edges will increase the vertex count – you can read about that all over the forum if you care to – but it doesn't matter. You need them. Hard normal edges are exactly the same thing as having different faces intersect; what's cool is that they transform as a single vertex, which makes them easier to work with.

 

Thanks for all the feedback guys, its very useful. Have two questions now:

@larvantholos: is there an "easy" way of removing extra loops? I know how to ad them,and i know i can delete them will result in a hole in the model, but is there a way to remove the loop and have things sort of merge?

@Jessy: I am not sure I understand the hard edge thing... you mean its better to have things have squarish angles in between vectors?

 

Another question! As noted earlier, the help is an entirely separate mesh. I have this mesh intercepting a lot with the head:

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Is this bad? If this went into a game, would this cause clipping issues?

If this is bad, what would be an appropriate way to handle such extreme geometry extensions? Make sure the extra mesh floats on top of the other without touching anywhere?

 

Here:

 

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Manual/Modifiers/Generate/Edge_Split

Along with subsurf creases, that's a requisite tool for hard surface modeling. (In your case, you should mostly be using it to delineate between hard surface (armor) and organic (not armor), though.)

It's only bad because it looks bad. The helmet can't push a robot skull in like that. You haven't modeled the helmet shape right.

What could the issue be? If you want clipping, you'll get it.

If the helmet will never come off, it's probably worth modeling the face edges into it. Otherwise, model them separately, and move the helmet until it looks good, with no care given to intersections.

 

I made a high poly version of this for my first animation project back in 2nd year.

 

Honestly I don't think the mesh is too dense at all. Then again, I only develop for the PC so I guess I'm the minority voice here.

Sure, you could reduce here and there (especially if you put some more thought into redesigning the front of the feet, the face, and the crests on the helmet) but overall it's fine.

The biggest issue will be whether it deforms properly once it comes time to animate it.

 

That's a hell of a lot better than my 2nd model ever

 

I'm having so much trouble trying to model Low Poly stuff. I get way too far into the details.. Got my first gamecharacter down to 2500 verts, and 4000 quads, wich will probably be way too high for our needs..
I'm not a king in texturing, so I try to get as much detail in the mesh as possible..So my hands, feet and face are carrying Way too many poly's.. Anybody know any good tutorials on the subject? Should I always avoid seperate fingers and feet, instead of making a Glove and texture the fingers and toes on that... The feet and hands currently accounts for about 1000 verts in my model..

 

Better character then I could ever do ;D

 

OK I was playing bait today, trying to implement some of the feedback I got through the thread. Here is my latest model:



This is using the same reference but taking a LOT of freedom, hopefully enough to keep the proportions about the same but to make the character my own (and something I may be able to use in my own games.)

I'm still not happy with the legs, they are too thin, and still want some more detail on the helm and chest.

The shoulders may seem a bit triangular but they are still squares. Bit messy there still though.

For this model I started with a cube and splitter from there, so my ends (tip of feet and top of head) are not ending in a bunch of triangles. The helm also was done by just extruding the face inwards into the head, so its all just one piece this time.

One thing I did a bit of an experiment with was the feet. Instead of extruding down and pulling from the front of the leg, I extruded down then bent the leg forward, from there crafting the foot. You may see that the loop that ends in the front tip of the shoe actually makes a sharp turn upwards under the ankle.

Also applied a lot of sharpening of the edges for the non-organic pieces.

I'll work more on the legs tomorrow and then I will try my hand at UV unwrapping this.

Oh and this one so far has 550 faces. Hopefully I am keeping this low poly enough to run in the iPhone 3Gs.

 

I'm not going to analyze it too much, I'm sure plenty of people will have critical feedback.

I just want to say that you seem to have done an excellent job of taking that feedback and putting it into play.

This model is 100% better than the first one, and the first one didn't suck

 

OK, today I spent some time toying about with the UV mapping and tossed together a quick flat colored texture to see how well I did. I notice that my attempt at "straightening up" the face and armbands in the UV did a disservice. The face and the black lines in those sections is very distorted, I guess I have learned to accept the twisted unwrapping Blender gives me. (I did check the "Stretch" checkbox while working on the UV so I sort of knew it was telling me it was not good, but I dared think "what do you know, stupid computer!" )

Anyways, know the texture needs lots of work, it was tossed together to test the UV. There are two things I don't understand now though:

1) I applied a baked Ambient Occlusion at the texture, but the result was... flat looking. There are a lot of flat polygonal edges showing up in the AO now.

2) It seems that once textured the "smooth" option does nothing in the default 3D view. That seems to magnify my issue with #1 (ponder if it's all there though... may be all here....) Do I have to play with the material to get the smoothing effect while the texture is visible?

Edit: Whoops forgot to attach the new screenshot!

 

Ok now much closer to finish!

Still hating the armbands and the face. Will work on those over the weekend.



Realized that part of the reason everything look flat earlier was the lack of lights. I added some lights to the scene to be able to see some smoothing.

I am rather happy with my attempt at giving muscle mass a bit of an ump via blurred shadows in the texture, and love how amazing things can look with an overlay pattern. Used some speaker grill texture overlay for the most "organic" pieces, a scratched metallic texture for the black metalic pieces and a brushed metal for the red pieces. Not too happy with that last one, think I used too large of a pattern and makes it look woodish... but looks better than without it. I'll work more on that later.

Darn, looking at it side by side with the one I posted earlier... the difference is HUGE!!!

 

Wayyy better, that second texture.. The armbands don't seem wrong to me, A little bit more work on the face, and you're almost done!

 

The armbands issue is mostly due to UV mapping. It's a bit more obvious in the previous shot due to its size. It zigzags a lot. May never be seen though, since the idea is for this to be more like a Mega Man scrolled game where the character would be rather small on screen, on a phone...

The face I think I'll entirely remake later. Did it at work with a mouse and literally copy-pasted eyes from an anime drawing to get a better feel of how it would look. I have an old tablet-pc at home, will see if i take it out and can use it to do some face painting with it and do something better. Have an old Wacom too but... well... I got it in 1999 and don’t think it's supported anymore Besides never was good at drawing on the Wacom and looking at the screen. If i was only able to justify buying a Cintiq...

 

OK I think I MAY leave it like this. Face looks a bit sad-ish but given the guy is supposed to be a robot... I did wanted him to be a bit emotionless.

Think I'm going to call this guy Omega Z.

Here is a before and after on the texture work side by side:

 

That looks great!

You sure caught on to the subtleties that you can pull off with the texture vs. the geometry.

That muscle shadow is the sort of thing that usually takes a while for someone to see the potential of, and you just ran with it.

You're off to a very strong start!

 

I am impressed.
Your first picture was very good for a beginner.
The way you reacted to the feedback and the improvements made based off of them shows professionalism.
Your last picture looks great (Other then the texture for the hands. For some reason I really don't like the Hexagon texture on the hands. BTW, It looks fantastic on the Greaves.)