his is
an overview of creating high polygon realistic 3D characters
( with a particular leaning toward the creation of the above
model ). My inspiration for writing it, was that as a
long time videogame artist used to working with real-time
constraints, I wanted to learn high resolution modeling techniques,
and I couldn't really find all the info needed on the subject
in one handy place. It's a pretty barebones overview,
since there is an entire books worth of material if everything
were to be covered in serious detail. So I'm really talking
about high level principles. It's also geared toward
capturing a likeness, since that makes up the vast majority
of the work I do, but I wont talk about rigging or lighting
or rendering, since they're really not my areas of expertise,
and entire tutorials in themselves. I'm attempting to keep
it as non software specific as possible, but forgive me If
I lapse into occasional Maya terminologies.
There are different surface
types available to us achieve a high resolution model. Most
of the time, I use smoothed polygons as opposed to true hierarchical
subdivision surfaces. With true SubD's you wont see any faceting
associated with traditional polygonal geometry, since a subdivision
surface is the result of an infinite mathematical refinement
process to ?smooth? a model at render time. However, I wont
go into why I prefer working with smoothed polygons here,
but If your model is smoothed to a high enough degree, you
wont see the aforementioned edge faceting under most circumstances.
The basic concept of working with both surfaces is still one
of 'subdivision', and the workflows are very similar.
Some of these are interchangeable,
but generally speaking, this is the basic workflow:
1) Model
2) UV map and texture
3) Rig
4) Pose/Animate
5) Apply polygon smooth
node
6) Render
http://www.cgunderground.com/tutorials/M_highpolycharacter/i ndex.php