Human head: box or poly-by-poly?

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Hirazi Blue
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Human head: box or poly-by-poly?

Post by Hirazi Blue » 08 Jun 2015, 11:06

This is technically a cross-post from the German xsiforum.de, but I could really use some additional opinions. I am about to embark on my quite probably ultimate attempt to model a more or less realistic head, but as I haven’t started yet I am very much open to suggestion. My question at this point is: should I approach human head modeling using a poly-by-poly modeling method or should I use the apparently way more used box modeling. And importantly: I would like to hear some your reasoning for choosing a specific method.
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gaboraa
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Re: Human head: box or poly-by-poly?

Post by gaboraa » 08 Jun 2015, 12:35

I would sculpt the head first and than re-topology the head. That way, you would have a fine control over how your edge-flow will look like.You can also paint edgeflow on top of your high-res mesh as a planning phase for retopologizing. Doing box modeling is also a way to go but you would have a nice reference images to build the mesh without topology errors and of course it depends on how good your sub-d skills are.

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Hirazi Blue
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Re: Human head: box or poly-by-poly?

Post by Hirazi Blue » 08 Jun 2015, 12:51

While starting with sculpting sounds like a potentially fruitful method,
I am very much constrained to a pure polygon workflow (no sculpting abilities, whatsoever, I'm afraid).
;)
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rray
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Re: Human head: box or poly-by-poly?

Post by rray » 08 Jun 2015, 13:53

Generally I'd use poly by poly when working with background reference images simply because you have less polygons in the way in the beginning. Also nice for tracing some of the image contours and then filling the holes.

Box modeling (or rather 'Get->Face' modeling) when not using bg refs because you see more and see it earlier on.

Then again I'm not sure whether poly by poly and box modeling should even be things. . . you're just dealing with some tools like extrude, cut edge, bevel, and so on.. these first steps don't matter so much because even with poly-by-poly, you'll probably spend most of the time tweaking the closed model. For that I'll be important to know all the tools. You might want to delete a messy patch and use extrudes to fill it / want to fill the patch with a big polygon and use the cut edge tools on it.
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Daniel Brassard
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Re: Human head: box or poly-by-poly?

Post by Daniel Brassard » 08 Jun 2015, 14:58

Box modeling and poly-by-poly are proven sculpting methods and will get you there. It all depend on what will be your final output (beauty render or animation).

The big thing about modeling is control of the mesh and the poly/edge loop and trying to keep quads as much as possible, avoiding NGons and minimising triangles to non-critical areas. There are several threads on CGSociety on this issue. You may want to visit the site and learn from the experience of others.

As for sculpting software, did you try Sculptris? It's pretty good and free.

http://pixologic.com/sculptris
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forton
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Re: Human head: box or poly-by-poly?

Post by forton » 08 Jun 2015, 15:59

If I want to work exactly to what I have in my mind I often start with nose, ears, mouth, eyelids, skull, and then stitch it all together, it gives me much more control, at first it seems like lot's of stitching, but at the end it's much less work than one would expect.

For creation on the fly z-brush (and sculptris) are my favorites, z-remesher in z-brush gives me a polyflow in most cases "almost ready to animate" for my standards.

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Hirazi Blue
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Re: Human head: box or poly-by-poly?

Post by Hirazi Blue » 08 Jun 2015, 21:20

Thank you guys, I'm going to give "poly-by-poly" a try for this project.

@Daniel Brassard - My inability to sculpt doesn't have anything to do with a lack of tools.
I'm a "vertexpusher" at heart, I'm afraid...
;)
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