Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[CoriDavis]

and I must say, I was wrong about it! I never used it because I thought it wouldn't do the things I wanted and I would always do everything "from scratch". Absolutely none of my previous models used the subdivided feature.  But now I decided I would try it out and I feel amazed and stupid at the same time that I didn't use this before! (Herpaderp  ) So this is what I came up with. Bet you can't guess what it is! of course now I have to figure out how I'm going to add the eyes and mouth in there...

[benzjie]

It's bamby !  And for adding the eye's and mouth..welcome to loopmodelling.

[CoriDavis]

Actually it's a My Little Pony from Friendship is Magic (unless you were joking, in that case, LOL!) but yeah... I'm sure I'll figure something out.

Edit: Made a nostril by using Inset on a face a few times and moving the new points

[Raxx]

It's about time!

Looks good for a first subdivision model. However, you've only given us a side view. How does it look from another angle, and where's that wireframe so that we can critique it to shreds?

[CoriDavis]

It's only half-a-pony right now because my style is to make half, then mirror it, but yeah here's that wireframe. I added a mouth as well.

Edit: EYEHOLE! It looks a bit creepy now...

Edit 2: and finally the eye is finished.  I used a very flattened circle for the eyeball and a seperate transmap for the pupil so I can move it around with morphs. The problem with that is, it can't really blink and it looks very detached from the face in the front view.  Anyone know a better way to do this?
(PS. is it just me, or does the front view resemble Spyro?)

[$imon]

Hey good to see you've entered the scary world of subdivision!

It's good to see youre experimenting with shapes.. a few tips I can give that might help develop your skills:
- Try to keep your polies 4-sided, in the face there are a lot of triangles and 5- or even 6-sided polies at the moment, which never helps with subdivision.
- Elaborating on this is the blinking-issue; for the eyelids to close around the eye they need some polies to spare to fill up the space over the eye, this is done by edge-loops around the eyes.
- For the eye to look good on the model it is probably best to keep it spherical. This is closest to live animals and easy to animate. It is convenient to start with a sphere for the eye, and model the face around it so it will fit perfectly and your character will look good from all sides. I wouldnt know of a good solution to fix the eye as it is now without making big changes to the face mesh.

I like your cartoony style so far and I hope you'll keep that I'm always so bad at that haha..

[CoriDavis]

I finally found a solution to the eye.  I made it just like the eyeball and stuck it on there, lol.

$imon: I don't see the 5 and 6-sided polys you were talking about, but then again, I'm not good at catching those.  As for the triangles, I see those as necessary.  Without them, the eye wouldn't have its shape that it needs.  Anyway, here's a display render and I'll get to some renders of the morphs as soon as I finish them.

Edit: Morphs finished

[Raxx]

As you venture into the subdivision modeling world (or further into any aspect of 3D for that matter), you'll find that there is a lot more emphasis needed on the foundation of whatever it is you're working on. However, it can be argued that so long as the results are satisfactory, there isn't a "wrong" way to subdivision model. Just know that not being "wrong" isn't the same as being the most right.

You can still get the shape of the eyes you want by just using loops of quads rather than odd mixes of triangles and (n+4)-gons. I attached an example of what two loops around the eyes would look like, and circled some of those 5-sided polygons that $imon mentioned.

You've managed to make some decent morphs, but I imagine if you wanted to get some more exaggerated expressions going on, you'll start finding a lot more problems with the deformations and general polygon structure. Also, don't ponies need to blink?

Try morphing with a 0-level subdivision--you'll see that it looks quite horrid. Even though it seems like subdivision lets you "cheat" with deformations and smoothing, you still have to follow the general rules of the polygonal organic modeling that you've done in the past, such as emphasis on adding quad loops to joints, and having loops around the eyes, mouth, and other active areas. I personally recommend you have at least three edge loops around each joint for better deformation when animating and posing, even for simpler cartoony meshes.

I can't say it's unexpected, working from a sphere can lead to a messy infrastructure unless you have a ton of patience with box modeling. So keep at it! There are tons of articles and examples of proper edge/polygon loops and other polygonal subdivision modeling techniques available online. Once you conquer the basics then a whole new world of options open up for you.

[dwsel]

I sketched my ideas on polyloops, but it looks you're progressing fast, and I understand you will not want to follow these this time as you already have morphs. But anyway... for next time Green are edges and red are poles - 5-edged vertex.

There are tons of articles and examples of proper edge/polygon loops and other polygonal subdivision modeling techniques available online.

...with best which were on subdivisionmodeling.com forums, sadly not available anymore, but people managed to save most important materials which are gathered here: http://www.spinquad.com/forums/showthread.php?31428-subdivisionmodeling.com-a-corner-with-great-resources-is-down!

I just thought someone could be interested as well

[CoriDavis]

Yes, I understand.  I'm definitely an "as long as it works" person.  I do realize I'll have to work with some other way to make the eyes blink, such as a seperate eyelid, because making the whole head blink is obviously not going to work.

Anyway, I've made the skeleton to begin rigging and I'm already running into problems.  Am I to assume that subdivisions are not weightable? because when I go to try painting my model...
*unsubdivides itself* "What the heck!?" *Stops responding* "Here we go again..." *The program has encountered a problem and needs to close... blah blah blah* "NOOOO!"

[Arik_the_Red]

Looking good, Cori. When I animated my morphed goblin face I made it with eye sockets, then separate eyeballs and eyelids that were bone-animated for movement and blinking.

Of course, the eye being on a bone figure set-up assumes that the eyeball would be a proper sphere and able to rotate around on a bone without a strange bulge and burst from eye socket effect that occurs with flattened, ovoid, etc. eyes.

As for eyelids, they can be formed in the structure of your morph-object as well. I just wanted to see how the lids would work with figure bones. In my case, I had upper and lower lids on a bone that functions scissor style for blinking, with each eyelid being created based off a sphere. Again, requiring htat the general form of the eye and lids are spherical and not somehow flattened or warped.

[CoriDavis]

Normally I would make an eyeball with an eye socket and use bones for blinking, but the problem here is the eyeball/head size ratio.  If I were to try to make an eyeball as a sphere for this model, it would be so big that it wouldn't even fit inside of the head! not to mention it would probably result in a bug-eyed look.  I wanted to make it as canon as possible.

Any skinning suggestions? I'm assuming I'll have to try bone influences rather than weights but... I have absolutely no idea how those work at all.  Unless somebody has Skype or some instant messenger that they could walk me through it maybe?

[Raxx]

As far as I recall, it's the exact same process to paint subdivisions as it is to paint polygonal models. You can only paint the cage mesh, which is why it unsubdivides itself (and it's why proper edge loops for the cage mesh is important!). But it shouldn't crash. Try setting the subdivision level of the subdivision object to 0 in the object editor before weight painting it in the figure editor, to see if that helps any.

[ENSONIQ5]

You'd probably be better off sticking to weight painting for this model.  Bone influences allocate vertexes to bones using a geometric limit system - ie. if a vertex falls within the inner sphere it will move with the bone, if it is beyond the outer sphere it is unaffected, and if it falls between the inner and outer spheres it is partially affected depending on distance.  This can have advantages over weight painting in that you can't miss vertexes, which is fairly easy to do with weight painting, but it can be difficult to prevent unwanted overlapping of areas.  For example, if using influences on a skinned hand it would be easy to have the outer influence of one finger influencing vertices from a neighbouring finger, producing unwanted results.  With weight painting, you define how much vertices are influenced irrespective of their distance from the bone, providing far more control, but perhaps less consistency.

The eyeball problem is common when animating models based on toys, which generally over-exaggerate eye size.  One possibility is to use a section of a sphere only, with the bone pivot point set to where the centre of the eyeball would be, even if it is outside the head.  This still requires room around the eye socket for the eye ball section to move into, but possibly the eyeball section could be morphed to distort as required, so as not to project outside the head when moved to an extremity.  The main advantage bones have is they can animate rotation, which generally looks better for eye movement than the linear motion morphs are limited to.

By the way, lovely model, and good organic modelling is something that takes time and patience to master, which is why I have barely attempted it!  Some call it an art... I call it sheer torture!

[Arik_the_Red]

As Raxx suggested, creating your eye-sphere, then arranging it on a bone, and cutting it down afterward, so that you only have the portion of sphere needed for the pony's head. No one sees the fact that the full sphere size is huge and that the bone is likely anchored far beyond the opposite side of the head.