Secrets of Swimsuit Babeby Jimmy Chow, Hong Kong
The thing about modeling the torso is to create proper structures at where the bones are prominent. They are clavicle, scapula, ribs and sternum. The important soft structures are breasts, stomach and navel. The edge flows are in accord with these hard and soft structures. Similar to modeling the head, I started with a cube, roughed out the shape and then changed edge flow revolutionarily. The only part being built separately was the breast which was a half sphere. Alternatively you can build the rib cage, calvicle, scapula and stomach separately and then combine them afterwards.
Arm
I think the arm is the most difficult part to build due to the delicate change in directions of the contour along its length and the requirement of a bended elbow in the target pose. It’s easier to build if it’s a man’s arm. A woman’s arm is very delicate and looks just like a primitive cylinder with very subtle changes in its surface. You actually need a complex structure to incorporate these changes. I do not think the one I built was a good one.
I needed a topology at the elbow that could let me tweak for a proper shape when it is bended 90 degrees. So I needed to change the model after it has been rigged. This process was performed a few times before finished.
Leg
The leg was a bit easier to build as I didn’t need a bended leg in the pose I wanted. Just follow the edge flow along the muscle structure underneath. Do not exaggerate the gastrocnemius (back of lower leg), otherwise the leg will look terrible.
Hand
A skeleton was built for the sake of measuring lengths of fingers as shown in the following figure
Each section of the fingers was created separately out from a cylinder with 8 divisions around axis and 2 along length. They were parented under respective joints. Then they were combined with the palm which was also a separate object. The knuckles and wrinkles were constructed afterwards.
Foot
I’ve found the position of the little toe very important in determining the overall shape of the foot. It’s located back about 1/4 (or more) the length of the entire foot. That’s why I put a check point for it before proceeding to construct the toes, otherwise you’re wasting your time. All the toes except the big toe are bended downward. Do not try to make the tendons of toes prominent like those of the fingers. In other words, the topology should not imply them at all. Keep rotating the foot to see the arches formed and where the bones jut out and compare them with the references. Note how the tibia juts out to form a hollow area below it when the foot is pointed
down.
UV Mapping
This is the most tedious and the least enjoyable task in the character making process. I always want to automate it as much as possible. As I wanted to texture it by projection rather than painting on the UV plane, UV distortion is not an issue as far as the resolution is high enough to cover the details. So I used Pelting Tools to perform this task. (Refer to appendix section for download URL)
The UV map is separated into 3 regions. The head is in U=0-1, upper body in U=1-2, lower body in U=2-3 as shown in Fig. 2.6.1. So there are three pieces of textures. All their resolutions are of 4096 x 4096 so that details can be well covered. There’re several reasons why I did this. One obvious reason is that it can increase usable texture resolution because I can have 3 pieces of 4096 x 4096 textures. Another reason is that I want maximum resolution for the face. The third reason is that it is a more economical use of UV space. If you put the whole body into one piece of texture, the percentage of used space would be smaller, probably less than 50%. The next reason is that the seams between these three pieces would not be visible. I can safely hide them away. Finally I want to prepare for displacement map generation in ZBrush. Because its Multi Displacement 2 Plugin can detect UV regions and can generate separate maps for them.
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