Playing with proxies

[joepal]

As I'm planning to open another user contrib repo for proxies/topologies, I've amused myself with making a very low poly (408 faces) proxy to see if it's possible to make it deform properly and fit existing skins to it.

Works surprisingly well:

Added some extra faces at chest to make it work for female deforms

Male model exported with rig and "middleage caucasian male" skin, rendered in cycles.

Ok, obviously the skin doesn't look entirely convincing in this setting, although I think this is in part due to my crappy UV unwrap. However, I doubt anyone who wants a 408 face toon will use a 4096x4096 skin texture for it anyway.

[joepal]

In blender:

[Oscalon]

Looking good!

[joepal]

Better UV unwrap. Now it works reasonably with existing skins. I guess it'll never win beauty contests though.

[joepal]

Ok, final version. Now it deforms nicely with rigs, and the skins work decently with both male and female.

Now all we need is a repo to upload it to.

[duststorm]

Pretty useful for low LOD situations.
Only it's a pity that if you want clothed humans, you'd have to define low LOD meshes for all clothes you're using.

Unless perhaps it would be enough to project the clothes textures on this topo's texture. After all, you'd be using it for far-off renders so might not be noticeable.

Btw, if you'd try to create a more detailed proxy, with face details, you'll find that it becomes a lot trickier to get the makeclothes/proxy vertex groups correct.