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volume 1, issue 18

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Thinking Outside the Box:
Making it Count

By Paul "Villam" Steed

Anything I say comes from me and represents my personal opinions, views and subtle plans for influencing society. Read, ruminate over and remember at your own risk. If I teach you something and it helps, teach someone else.

ew modelers often ask me for advice about this that or the other concerning their model and I usually tell them to send it and let me take a look. My basic criticisms usually run along the lines of a need for a better understanding of anatomy, less polys (or more polys in specific areas), but the most prevalent thing that comes up with a rookie model is ‘making it count’.

By ‘making it count’ I mean every vertex, every face and every edge has to serve a purpose. If it doesn’t delineate or define a part of the geometry then it needs to GO. In low-poly modeling this is a very important theory to understand. It applies to not only model integrity it applies to optimization and animation as well.

Look at and compare the following two pics:

The differences when you first look aren’t much but they’re there. The shoulders are pretty much identical but look at arm 1 and arm 3 (front and back) in both pics.

The ‘before’ arm doesn’t have much variation in it’s outline. All the arm views show a lack of a huge amount of variation but these in particular show the difference. What I’m trying to drive home here is to use the lines to create interest in the model and make them crucial to the geometry.

Now compare arm 2 in both images…

Not only is the ‘before’ arm lacking in a strong outline variety it has an extraneous vertex above the wrist that divides the edge there. In arm 4 there’s too many divisions along the forearm near the front of the elbow juncture…

(Continued on next page)

Credits: Thinking Outside the Box logo illustrated and is © 1998 Dan Zalkus. Thinking Outside the Box is © 1998 Paul Steed. All other content is © 1998 loonyboi productions. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited, so don't even try it. We've got really big guns, and we're ripped, baby.