@thorn-neverwake
I can agree with that. Individual body parts are niche. I like to leave that to the individual user to split off body parts from the full body. There are some exceptions to this like the hands, feet, eyes & mouth. Might even be worth it to remove them later to reduce file size.
Full body realistic base meshes can be more advanced or too detailed but they definitely have many uses.
When viewed from a sculptors perspective the most important assets that are missing are simpler base meshes for blocking out proportions and poses.
@1D_Inc Any topology guidance can be taken from the existing base meshes too. Having them all in one makes them even better multi-purpose assets.
When I was tweaking foot bones I thought that it would probably be nice to handle sculpting basemesh in Dylan style as well. The tasks are pretty similar, the only difference is that tweaked parts forms exoskeleton instead of a endoskeleton.
For this task I decided to fall into my favourite brutal lowpoly style, when you need to listen chiptune to achieve the goal, to provide the least amount of geometry for the sake of a shaping flexibility.
I started with the head and tried to optimize it as much as possible while keeping the necessary details recognizable in subd. Then I modelled the body trying to keep parts intersections recognisable which is important for such kind of style.
I ended with such a result:
Not sure if I’ve posed/placed bones into skeleton correctly, or if I can handle this task any further, as our studio is approaching a deadline, perhaps this task will interest @Tonatiuh?
These look awesome. The only thing I would change would be to split the torso into chest and hips (or even into three parts: chest, abdomen and hips). Oh, and maybe add “mitten” fingers to the hand too?
Thank you for the feedback.
Yes, it is a nice idea to split the torso)
Not sure about fingers - there are no fingers on the reference video, and I am not familiar with the exact requirements.
If @Tonatiuh is interested it would be great to do a detailed pass on the skeleton with subdiv levels.
Otherwise I’ll save the base mesh for now and handle it later myself
The volume base mesh looks good but I don’t know if realistic proportions are that useful.
Cartoony and stylized proportions are much more common for these base meshes since they allow to make big proportional changes before committing to a merged remesh or topology.
For the purpose of realistic character models, a full topology with detailed multires levels is a more practical starting point.
Cartoony style assumes hyperbolization of a natural forms in the direction, defined by specific style, and there are many of them.
I think that natural shapes volume basemesh could be useful as a nice starting point for lots of different stylistic directions, and its compound structure makes it also easier for pose setup.
This is why it was made lowpoly and lightweight - for faster shaping during artistic research, so having it could be more beneficial than not having it.
I agree. It’s much more useful to start from realistic proportions and know in what direction you are stylizing than be biased by the preferred style of the blockout mesh creator.
By the way, there was quite a research behind this lowpoly basemesh head.
For many years I was wondering what is the smallest topology mesh with the least amount of controls that can represent the most facial shapes to create a versatile sudb-compatible human head sculpting basemesh. So many heads have been retopied manually for this purpose…
Ok in that case we can aim for a realistic volume based base mesh as well.
For a cartoony base mesh I would aim for a much more simplified topology, with generic proportions and no anatomical details. This will likely not work for extreme proportion changes but it can still be a good base to start from.
@1D_Inc My main feedback for the topology of your low poly human is that it relies too much on poles.
The goal shouldn’t be to reach the lowest polycount with the highest possible shape control via the topology.
The goal should be to provide the most basic topology possible with a good base resolution to further subdivide for multires sculpting. Any shape details and control should be done via sculpting, so the topology needs to be malleable to any change.
We might need to ship these volume base meshes with a couple of multires levels to give a good base level of definition. Especially for the realistic one.
Follygon just recently released another ModMesh asset pack, which shows the topology very well:
But even there I’d argue that evenly distributed quads would be best everywhere.
Sure.
I constantly missed proportions when sculpting faces from scratch due to the lack of basic guidelines.
My goal was keeping the basic details of the face for sculpting, its topology was designed to follow and support them, so it handles multires pretty well (in my opinion):
Nice reference! Brings lots of clarity to the task)
I think that realistic volume based base mesh could be modified in that way as well to achieve similar result. For sure, evenly distributed quads has their benefits during sculpting.
I would prefer to keep this lowpoly head for realistic basemesh and provide simplified one for cartoony basemesh version. How about something like that?
added 3 shapekeys to realistic blockout head (realistic male, realistic female, toon male), tested multires with mouse for a couple of a minutes, seems to be fine.
I am on the fence about adding shape keys to the assets. So far only multires and subdiv modifiers are on some base meshes.
I wonder what you think.
Adding shape keys or even geo node modifiers to these assets would be incredibly powerful for quickly creating shape variations and getting more out of a single base mesh.
But it then also requires an additional step of applying the visual geometry (or at least the modifiers) to the mesh. This isn’t obvious and something people can stumble over.
The future could bring features to make this easier but for now I’m not sure.
The workflow behind head shapekeys is pretty straightforward - you open a file, select a head, set the desired shape, then apply mesh, drop multires and start sculpting.
Shapekeys has another useful purpose - shape transitions.
It is not that hard to imagine something feminine (or toonish), but it is quite challenging to make something looking like that in practice.
For example, if to temporarily remove all the shapekeys except toonish, it is possible to get a male-female transition, which is a nice artistic guideline for the required shape changes.
This also adds a certain amount of a variety into the base shape for sculpting.
For sure, having the resulting assets structures as simple as possible is the best path to follow, but in that particular head mesh case shapekeys brings too much unique and powerful abilities in my opinion in a technically cheap and affordable solution.
Also, complete blockouts can have static mesh heads and the shapekeyed mesh head could stand nearby foots and hand parts.
I think being able to have shape keys as assets would be a must for this kind of thing. Or rather geonode assets that act like shape keys without needing to apply multires modifiers. This would allow for greatly customizable base meshes, leading up to the sorts of thing we used to use MakeHuman for.
Probably out of scope, but i have been thinking about it for a long time and i think it’s the right place to plant that idea in case it hasn’t come up
