Been busy,,,

Well I've been pretty busy with the model over the last few days. Managed to sort out the neck, arm and head! Here's the torso minus the head.


The head is a something that I struggled to do without any triangles at all. Still it turned out quite nicely. I decided to model it by strip modelling - simply extruding edges from a 1x1 plane around an eyeball. It turned out pretty well.

Here is the start.


And after a few hours, I attached the head to the neck. Just need to do the ears on the head.

Triangles, triangles, triangles....

Had a good chat with Daryl Marples, a colleague at Huddersfield Uni and he advised that I really try to eradicate ALL triangles. So that's been my mission the last few times I've worked on the torso.

First of all, I sliced the bottom portion of the torso as the streetfighter will be dressed in jeans or trousers. But it created more tris for me to sort out. The bulk of the problems are on the back. So tris are being turned into quads with the insertion of extra loops. Also added a suggestion of serratus muscles on the rib cage.
The shoulder needs work - the flow of the polys from the pecs isn't working very well.

Smoothed version.

Resculpted the shoulders so that the edges from laterally from the pecs. Also added a bit more detail on the pecs themselves. Tris on the back turned into quads by the addition of extra loops.

Smoothed version.


Am happy with the overall shape of the torso now. Even managed to eliminate ALL tris apart from a few on the central seam. These will disappear later. At the moment I am working on one half of the torso, applying a symmetry modifier and then a turbosmooth modifier on top. Once I'm done with half of the body, I shall collapse the stack and make the body assymmetrical and sort the tris on the seam.

Do need to work on the neck - at the moment, there is no shape to define the sternomastoid muscle or the larynx. Also I need to start on the arms.


Have been reading quite a bit on modelling and topology. It's amazing how much is written on tris, quads, loops and poles. I think that these articles will really help with my Literature and Contextual Review.

Started to model the torso

Well I started to box model the torso as an editable poly. I thought that I'd model a generic muscular body and then adapt it to get the proportions of Brad Pitt later when it's completed.

Started with getting the main chunks of the torso - pecs, delts, rib cage and stomach muscles.

Adding a little shape to the trapezius, rib cage, delts and pecs. Decided to take off the arms too as they were getting in the way.


Refining the traps, pecs, stomach and back of the lats. Need to get the definition of the side of the lats here.


Only occurred to me that perhaps I should use a skin tone! More general refinement here. Not happy with the clavicle area and the pit of the neck needs more work.

Neck looks better. Back of the neck - the trapezius muscle is too sharply defined. Needs to be softened. Also the rib cage looks too sharply defined too. Again needs to be softened. I've found the relax tool within the editable poly - very useful!!

I'm happy with the look of the traps, pecs, delts and lats. All coming together rather nicely. I think that the proportions of this torso are a little chunky compared to Brad Pitt, but it's not critical at this stage. The bit I will need to look are the muscles on top of the scapula - infraspinatus and teres muscles. Not sure if they are essential to define or whether to show a small bump will be sufficient.


Must admit that I've been really preoccupied with making sure the topology is correct. I'm trying my best to work on the edge loops of the muscle groups and to avoid 5 sided polys and triangular polys as much as I can. I've had to do obliterate big chunks of the torso - esp around the abs/obliques to get the topology just right.

I think it's looking okay so far.

Some sketches...

Well, I've been looking over the various anatomy books and have even done a bit of sketching. Picked up quite a few tips regarding proportions and the set up of a male character.

I've never really properly studied the anatomy of the abdomen - rectus abdominus, obliquus abdominus and serratus anterior and how they all fit together with relations to the rib cage. So the study has been a really useful exercise.


In order to place the serratus muscles correctly, a line is drawn from the pit of the neck through the nipple to the base of the ribs.

The arm is going to be a tricky body part to model and getting the rigging right will be tricky.