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Steven: Hi and welcome to 3dmotive.com.
My name is Stephen G. Wells and I'm a senior character artist.
In this tutorial, we're gonna take a look at
Quick Polygon Creation in Topogun.
We're gonna use a model of mine.
It's a caricatured basketball player.
It was for a game that ended not being released,
but I figured it would make a really good showpiece
for this particular tutorial, just something fun.
Before we get started, I actually want to go over,
you know, how you look at characters,
what you should pay attention to for joints and
the areas that you're gonna look to have more edge loops
like in the knees, in the necks, spine, things like that
than you would in the shin or upper thigh.
So in Photoshop, I'm taking a shot of this particular character.
I want to show you where you need to pay attention to
for edge loops because it's very important.
You need treat your character like it's an action figure
or it's a puppet. You know, it's gonna have certain joints
and obviously it's gonna be in the shoulder, elbows,
wrists, ankle, knees.
The areas in between don't need a lot of edge loops.
Obviously, the areas that are going to be bending
are the ones that you need to be concerned with
because that's where geometry will start to collapse
or fold in on itself or textures will stretch if you don't
do the right edge loops.
When you're creating the edge loops, you want to make sure
you're generous with some of the edge loops.
This is a quick diagram that I've done for my students
before to show you, for at least from the neck down,
about where the main joints are gonna be,
obviously, the spine or the back has a lot more joints in it.
We want to make sure it's gonna deform well,
but basically you have the joint in the shoulder, elbow and wrist.
You had one in the thigh, knee and ankle.
That's really where you need to make sure that
you're putting in enough edge loops.
The areas in between, you can be cheaper with polygons
and that's indicated by the red areas and if you
keep this mind when you're getting ready to retopologize
whether you're using Topogun or 3dcode or any of the
other ones, it helps you establish where you're gonna
add in more polygons and more edge loops than in
other areas, especially if you're on a specific polycount
you need to pay attention to something like that.
These green lines are showing about how the edge loops
might be set up.
See there's more in the shoulder, but as I start to go
down the arm, there's less in between, more in the elbows,
less in the forearms, more in the wrists
and that's what you want to make sure you pay attention to.
Same with the leg, there's more up in the thigh area,
the joint, less in between, more in the knee
and less in the shin areas, but of course more as we get down
towards the ankle, so it's ... you want to pay attention to that.
Plan ahead, so when you retopologize the model if you
plan ahead appropriately, you get the work done
that much quicker and better and usually the first time
around with a whole lot less mistakes with it involved.
So once you have an idea of what you're going to do,
we'll jump back into Topogun and we'll look to do a quick
create, now if you have depending on what version of
Topogun you're using, there's a couple ... two different
versions at least out there.
There's one that has this tool called Tubes,
which is this particular one right here.
Imagine it's going to create a cylinder for you
based on how you draw in, again, what we talked about
earlier, the edge loops.
So you want to make sure that you have enough
polygon, enough sides to your model and usually
with limbs I find about twelve, a twelve-sided cylinder
tends to do pretty well.
So if you remember, we're gonna kind of base this on
what we just did in Photoshop.
We'll go ahead and just, see these particular lines,
we want to try and kind of follow those.
Keep those at least in mind when we're doing this drawing out
or as we're adding in the edge loops using the tool, the Tubes tool.
So here I am just drawing. I'm just left clicking, drag.
Left click, drag. Okay.
Make sure you stay in one, as you're drawing these,
stay in one direction.
If you change the direction, you'll wonk up all the polygons
because it's based on, you know, the same direction.
So if you're creating the polygons all in one direction,
you'll have perfect geometry, so keep that in mind.
Once I'm done with this, I'm just going to right click
and now, as you can see, I can rotate the model around
and that's ... that's actually not bad right off the bat.
Looks like it could probably deform pretty well.
But you do want to keep in mind, I probably have to add in
a couple more extra edge loops down by the knee
where the pants were, where the cutoff, you know
it was a kind of a, bit of a jump there.
So let's go ahead now, if you don't happen to have the
Tubes tool in your particular version of Topogun,
I'll show you how to do this very simply with the
Simple Create button, how I like to do it.
By the way, these controls I'm panning around right now
uses Maya, the Maya controls.
So it's the Left Click + Alt to rotate,
Middle Button + Alt to pan and Right Button + Alt to
zoom in and zoom out.
Again, so that's Left Click + Alt for rotate,
Middle Mouse + Alt, pan, Right Mouse + Alt, zoom in zoom out.
So let me just zoom in a little bit.
I'm gonna go ahead and start with the one edge loop
that's up in the joint of the thigh area,
so I'm just left clicking, left clicking, left clicking.
That's all I'm doing with this. This is a Simple Create button.
So I'm just going to rotate the model around.
Left click, left click, left click.
Again, I'm creating my own cylinder if you will.
I'm gonna go ahead and down to the farthest extent,
again remember we're piecing this up.
Imagine it's a marionette, so this is now the one piece
for just the thigh itself.
We're not looking to do the knee or anything else at this point.
I held down my control key just to snap that up, okay
and now I'm gonna go ahead and fill in the rest of the polygons
with the Simple Create.
Now, you keep having to switch out of Create,
the Simple Create to Simple Edit.
If you don't, it creates problems.
So keep the control ... hold down your control key
and stay in the Simple Create, but here's what will happen.
if you don't get back into Simple Edit
and then go back into Simple Create, this is the problem.
You can't get out of it.
So control z, control z. Make sure that as you're creating
at least with this method, create your polygon,
get into Simple Edit.
Create your polygon, get back into Simple Edit.
Just keep switching.
Get them holding down my control key, control control.
That's how you snap from veritices to vertices using
the control key and I'm just doing the Simple Create, Simple Edit.
Simple Create, Simple Edit.
And this is the way that I do it.
This is what I was using before TopoGun came out with the
Tubes tool and again like I said, you might be using
a version of Topogun where you don't have the Tubes tool,
so this is really great practice to get you used to how you would
create the joints of your model and the polygons in between.
All right, so let's go ahead and we're just going to do a
quick bridge there and there.
I only did it in those, that two areas because bridge
understands that small gap.
If I try to do it at such a far extent on the two edge loops,
it wouldn't have worked, but now I have to get into my
Simple Edit and we're gonna grab just the edges.
So i'm gonna turn off my Verts and I'm gonna double click
one edge and it selects them all.
I'm gonna go to Connect. Hit Connect and it just created
that edge loop for me.
I'm gonna do it again and hold down my shift and select
this one and double click.
Connect.
Boom. You basically have it. It's like okay, there you go.
Now obviously, I want to have more edge loops in here
'cause it's that joint area up in the inner thigh
so we're gonna double click that.
Very simple, very quick.
You can turn around and do your entire model.
I could do the legs that way, obviously, I do the arms
this way, if I didn't have the Tubes tool.
Again, the Tubes tool is great. I want to go ahead and add,
I just double clicked on that edge.
I want to add in another set of edge loops in there.
I'm now gonna move, I'm gonna get into my Verts tool
and I'm just gonna left click and hold each vertice.
I'm just gonna drag it out a little bit, space it out a little bit more.
Now sometimes, it's rare, but sometimes you get
these little gaps now that are there and yet they're kind of not.
Connect sometimes does that, so in order to fix that
I just have to get into my edge tool.
I'll just delete that edge and I'll go for this one
and then back to Bridge, seal it, seal it
and go back, I'm gonna select this edge and delete it,
go back to Bridge, seal it
and select this edge, delete it and hit the Bridge tool
and seal it.
Now it doesn't always do that.
I'm just kind of surprised it did on this particular model,
but for the most part, it tends to work really well and
you don't get those errors, but that's how you fix it.
You just grab an edge, delete it and then rebridge that area.
But there you go. It's very quick, very simple
especially if you don't have the Tubes tool.
It's a great way to make the polygons as you need them
very quickly, very easily following edge loops to make
yourself an in-game low resolution model.
It's very quick, very simple.
You could turn around and do the rest of the limbs that way
and then mirror all the geometry and you'd be done
pretty quickly with the body itself.
The only thing you need to take some time with is
modeling the face, technically.
Oh by the way, you can also for this particular model
if you'd like, you can actually use the Tube tools to
actually create a good start for your mesh for the
actual trunk of the body.
It's a really great tool if you happen to have it
and then just seal it all up and add in the polygons
as you need and do some mirroring and get your
character done pretty quickly and that's it.
Thanks for watching 3dmotive.com and my name is
Stephen G. Wells.