Live and learn...

A few more delays on the human mesh.

I've been doing my humanoid mesh the hard way, and it's been looking kind of mediocre. No worse than the character models of a few generations ago, but still not as nice as I'd like for a modern game. Maybe the video tutorials I was using were old or based on methods from those times?

I probably could have used it, but it would end up taking a lot longer to get right. I was starting to worry that this project would take forever.

I'm going to try a different method. Luckily, I've played around with this method before, and it comes pretty naturally to me. It's the method I used to create my first few models- sculpt mode in Blender. I thought that I couldn't keep my meshes small enough with this method- falsely believing that sculpt mode added polygons. So I've been modeling face by face. It's a bit tedious, honestly.

But no- it turns out sculpt mode doesn't add polygons. That's awesome news. For any non-video game playing readers, video game models need to conserve polygons so that they can be rendered in real time.

I can start with a cube and give it several levels of "Multires" to add the number of faces I need to work with, which progressively rounds it out to a spherelike shape, while adding faces. Using this method I can carefully decide how many faces I want the final mesh to have.

Then I mold it like clay. I might have to do some hand editing on the joints of the mesh at the end to get it to animate right. This mesh will have the right number of polygons for a game asset. Even better, I can then save the file with a different filename, add a few more layers of multires, and add as much detail as I'd like the final model to have. From this, I can create a "normal map", which I will apply to the low-resolution mesh like a texture. This will give the low res mesh the look of the higher-res mesh in everything but its silouette. Ultimately it will look great. That is, if it works like I expect it to.

I'll let you know how it works out, and post pictures then. If it does work, I've just sped up my work a lot. If not, I'll eat a bit of crow. :)