Watch Your Flow:

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We will now finish the head off. This will include a little optimizing and also to fix the Poly Flow. Poly flow relates to the flow of edges along the surface of your mesh. This helps with the over all mass/form of the mesh and the smoothing groups when they are applied. A GeoSphere is a great example of what I mean by this.

The flow of the edges like the blue, red and green line here will give you a much cleaner mesh and better smoothing groups.

Optimizing; there are four types of optimizing as you would know if you have read Modelling a Character in 3DS Max by Paul Steed (Highly recommended book, if you don’t have this book go buy it TODAY.)

• Hidden Geometry; involves deleting any vertices or faces that won’t be seen, even when the character is animating.

• Sacrifice; involves sometimes severely modifying the geometry of your mesh, prioritizing the various design elements involved and even sacrificing one or two of them to meet your face-count budget.

• Relative Face Distribution; if you have read many of my posts on PolyCount you may have seen me quote this before. “Refers to a comparative look at the size and number of faces in various areas of the mesh and evening them out accordingly.” I believe this is one area which most people don’t see eye to eye on. I personally think more important an element to a character the higher number on polys (more detail) you should put into it. Like the head.

• Consolidation; is the act of streamlining or gently smoothing the topography or surfaces of the mesh. Find that vertex or edge that doesn’t really contribute to the shape and merge it into the rest of the mesh. To help you work out if a vertex or edge is contributing to the over all shape the mesh you need to measure the important of that vertex or edge. The important of a vertex can be measured by the angel that the surrounding edges make from that vertex, and the size of the faces made around the vertex.

As you can Angel X is 180^o therefore making is useless.

Angel Y is very close to 180^o this makes this angel more Important than angel X but we would weld that vertex before we would weld angels Z or W.

Angel W is less then 180^o.Which means that this could be done with texture, but now with the new game engines in game light is much better. Therefore making angel W more important than angel Y. But generally angel Y would be more important than angel W, to know which one is more important you will need to know if the game your model is for has real time self shadowing or not.

One of the most important things about this area of optimization shown by angel X is. NEVER DEFINE A FLAT PLANE!!!! Two faces can do the same job as 4000!!! You may think this is a given, but I know many artist that have been working with low-poly models for over 12 mouths do this. And yes, I find it funny every time I see it.

So after applying these techniques, this is what I have. It is not fully optimized (about 150 less faces) but I will do a full optimize when the rest of the model is done.

Proportions:

Ok this is something cool I came up with when I was making my last model, a proportion line. Now that we have the head we can add this line. Proportion can be measured in heads tall. In general a male is 8 heads tall and heroic male 9.5 heads tall, a female is almost 8 heads tall and a heroic female 9 heads tall. By using your concept art you should be able to work out what your characters proportions are. My character is about 6 of his heads tall.

Make a line in Max that is as long as your head is tall (the models head not your real head.) Give that line a lip at each end, shift copy the line the number of heads tall your character is and attach the lines end to end you should have something like this. It is a good idea to put this line into your concept art as well.

This helps a hell of a lot I find with getting the rest of your model to have the right proportions. Even more helpful when you are making a realistic model and you have a good anatomy book (a must have for a character modeller.)

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Brendan George                                                                                                                                                                                              BrendanDoord@hotmail.com

Mid-Poly Modelling

09/2002