Topology: the study of geometrical properties and spatial relations unaffected by the continuous change of shape or size of figures. Retopology: the act of recreating an existing surface with more optimal geometry. A common use-case is creating a clean, quad-based mesh for animation, but it's also used for most any final object that needs textured, animated, or otherwise manipulated in a way that sculpted meshes are not conducive to. Examples of Low poly sculpts (source) Examples of Mid poly sculpts (source) Examples of High poly sculpts (source) I started looking at some guides and references on how to go about creating face topology for animation. I found these two different techniques- Face Topology Breakdown (for the breakdown I was looking more at the comments and discussions other animators made on the post) and Model a Head. Both talk about the main areas to focus on, the eyes and mouth, as these are the most important points when animating a face.
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Frank Tzeng -Lead Character artist at Naughty Dog Frank Tzeng creates amazing, high poly sculpts of characters, mainly for games like Uncharted 4. I had to take a second look at some of the models he's created because they look so realistic. For the likes of Uncharted he worked on Drake's overall look mainly focusing on head/facial, wrinkle, arms and hair developing (including modelling, sculpting texturing). He has an amazing ability to really bring the concept designs to life in his 3D models. One of my favourite pieces that he has created is a model of Robert Downey Jr as Ironman. This was a collabartion between between him and his friend Yibing Jiang (shader artist on the same team at Naughty Dog, https://www.artstation.com/artist/yibingjiang). The goal of the project was to make the most realistic CG render of Rober Downey Jr out there- which I feel they definitely achieved! Yibing did texturing, shading and rendered them out in Vray, also made the hair in Hairfarm base on the fibermesh hair that Frank made from zbrush- Including eyelashes, brows and beard. Here are 3 different of render results: The first one is more dramatic lights to show the shape and anatomy, the second one is lit by lit by neutral HDRI lights, third one is lit by neutral lights with Lambert shaders. They also created an bonus piece by compositing the render result with ironman digital panel to match the iron man feeling. This sculpt was created with Zbrush, 3ds Max, Vray, Photoshop, Mari and Hairfarm. Blair Armitage -3D Character Artist The style this artist has is probably much more to my tastes! She has a very cute and unique style when creating characters but is also very talented a creating realistic sculpts too. Most of her own personal work seems to be fanart or inspired by concept drawings by other artists- which I like as well because you can tell she really enjoys working on creating these characters. Realtime 3d fanart of Shigenori Soejima's character design of Aigis from Persona 3. This one is based on his artbook illustration, but also combines a few design elements from the Arena version. She wanted to try a FFXV style for this sculpt. The final character is around 130k tris. There is about a 2 hour long tutorial to go along with this sculpt but it focuses more on painting textures rather than modelling.. still super cool though! Then there's the more 'cutesy' sculpts I was talking about which is probably my favourite style. It's much more simple but still shows character and good design. "Oniko & Tama
This was made for the Artwar contest over at Cubebrush. I wanted to do a different take on the 'fantasy' theme, so here's my attempt at an eastern-inspired, whimsical fantasy character. She was a lot of fun to make!" I really love everything about this sculpt and the face is just so pretty and aesthetic! |