Now that I have my basic model finished, and before I rig it, I need to make sure that it's ready for the deformation that will happen when it's animated; this is absolutely crucial for any usable model within games or animations.
The Polycount Wiki is the site which is most referred to online, as it offers a great variety of tutorials and advice from both professionals and hobbyists. Specifically, the posts about topology for limbs, faces, shoulders and the general body are useful to me.
I don't feel I have the time to spend too long correcting the topology of my model, as my focus is mainly on the character animations, but I will at least get the crucial features for rigging finished. In hindsight, I should have done more research into these individual areas of topology before I started modelling my character, but it still shouldn't slow down my production timeline too much.
Limb Topology
The page on limb topology is the most important to me, as the arms and legs of my character have to move fluidly to make the animations look professional.
Firstly, the joints at the knees and elbows should be modelled so that they can easily collapse when bent, and look natural doing so. With the current limb topology on my mesh, the joints would become distorted when bent.
Secondly, the weights on the joints whilst skinning should be similar to the diagram below. The top bone shouldn't have 100% control over the top vertices, as that would create jagged, unnatural movement; instead, there should be a little bit of leeway for the bottom bone.
Shoulder Topology
For me, the second most important topology to correct on my model is the shoulder. After reading all of the posts from the Polycount Wiki, it's clear that the way I've done my shoulder won't work perfectly when I rig my model. I will try using the more complicated method of shoulder topology which is shown below, but if I find it's taking too long I will try the 'deformed cylinder' method.
In his video on shoulder topology, Jonathan Williamson runs through all of the loops that should go around a shoulder model. A lot of them follow the anatomy of muscles in a real shoulder, which creates a more realistic effect when moved around during animation.
On the diagram below, the first model has topology which has good muscle formation, but is harder to unwrap and doesn't bend as well. The bottom model shows the deformed-cylinder topology which is easy to weight and unwrap, but doesn't look as anatomically correct.
Body Topology
I am fairly happy with the correct topology of my characters body, but it will need adjusting to fit in the new shoulder topology, so it makes sense to make any vital corrections where I can.
Because the shoulder and chest have to fit together perfectly, I decided to watch the other video by Jonathan Williamson which talks about all of the loops on the chest. Although the diagram below makes it look complicated, the topology for the chest is all logical, and it already looks similar to my own character.
As you can see from the image below, the body topology can be done in a variety of different ways, and the model from Spy Hunter uses very simple top logy on the chest and legs. In a similar way to the shoulder, if I don't have the time to create complicated topology for the chest, it should work fine as it is.
Face Topology
For me, the facial topology of my model is the least important aspect to correct, as I may not have time to implement facial rigging and animation.
For advice on facial topology I followed an
informative forum post by a user named Del. In a similar way to the video on shoulder anatomy, Del explains all of the different loops he uses on faces and why they're so important. I found that my character already has a lot of these loops, but for better facial animation I could still try improving it.
For more examples of cartoony facial topology, I found that Pinterest has a huge amount of user-created images that I can use as reference. Although a lot of them are for animations where the poly-count doesn't matter as much, there are also images which provide extremely useful insight into game character creation. I may consider uploading my own work once the dissertation is completed.
