The work I did on the Swiss Mountain Dog gave me some ideas about modeling a realistic human being. Here’s the rough draft of the torso and legs. The arm stubs are in that position to get them out of the way of the upper torso work.
And here are the wires
As you can see, very little work done on the back side yet.
y not use MH, you masochist?
Because he wants to take the time to practice, ‘tahts y’. I applaud his effort, there should be a rule that people should only be allowed to use things like MH when they’ve proven they’re good enough artists to be able to do it by themselves.
Anyway, what the heck is the ‘masochist’ comment for? Considering you haven’t actually made any threads with your work, ever, at all, (this is assuming you have any work) and that your avatar is a dull, no-talent photoshop hack, I don’t think you’re in a very good position to comment, ever, at all. 
Anyway, as a first human model ever thing, I’d have to say it’s at least marginally better than mine. You have one pretty major proportional proportional problem, but this is fortunately broad-range enough to be fixed by a 1-axis scale. The whole model appears to be squashed, just a bit, so try and slim it on the x axis, that should clean up a lot of problems, because the profile itself doesn’t look that bad.
Another main thing is that she appears to be leaning forward. Like, a lot. Starting where the middle of her foot will be, draw a straight line up in the side view. This should be the center of gravity, try to balance your model around this.
Anyway, the model could be good, so, get the main things cleaned up and we can work from there. Though I’ll give you what knowledge I’ve learned; that–unfortunately–isn’t much knowledge at all, so hopefully other people better at modeling than I (and also the hilariously irrepressible Mr. Roger Wickes) will help you.
OMG Backboe, then NONE of us would ever be able to use MH!!! And I’ll have you know I posted a head once that I am on Verstion freakin 10, and at least now she isnt a lizard. so there. Ugly as my mother-in-law, but humanoid nonetheless. But I can’t imagine taking on a real human body to mesh-model.
@Orinoco: good flow so far, man. Seriously. as crit, I would add one more loop that goes over her shoulder and under her armpit, so you can do a little muscle deform when her arm is raised (there’s another thread on MakeHuman with an animation that shows this; so that you can expand up (inflate) that muscle that actually raises the arm. At knee level, I would move the two edgeloops that are on either side of the knee closer to her knee so that weight painting can can fade those better.
@Orinoco: good flow man, seriously. Your edge loops around the hips will allow for very smooth shape keys, and low polys for fast rendering.
Fantastic, he has something to say. Anyway, point out the thread to me. http://blenderartists.org/forum/search.php?searchid=358340
Orinoco: As Roger said, the flow doesn’t look bad, I was having trouble nailing down things, though, which was why I was going to wait for you to balance out the main form.
you masochist?
Damn! busted! Seriously, if I were modeling architecture and needed some figures to stand around a building to make it look realistic, I’d probably go with MakeHuman. But as BlackBoe noticed, my interest is in figure drawing and portraiture, aka organic modeling.
BlackBoe, Roger vandalizes the wiki from time to time, so I cut him some slack. About the proportions, my reference photo is thinner and taller than I’ve modeled so far. The legs don’t go to the ankles yet, so she probably looks off. And she’s bending back a lot at the waist.
What I noticed when modeling the dog was that throwing an edge loop around a major surface form did wonders for the realism and ease of modeling, so I’m looking to do the same with this project. So far I’ve worked on the breasts and the abs. On the preliminary list are the lats and shoulder blades, erector spinae, quadriceps, hamstrings, calves, glutes, delts, biceps and triceps, trapezius and pelvic arch, in no particular order.
This isn’t my first attempt at a human figure. But it’s the first one where I had some idea of how to get beyond adjusting a cylinder to fit my reference photos, and then have the whole thing fall apart when I tried to add an armature. 
I realize she’s bending at the waste, but do you stand like that? I’m thinking it’d probably be fine for a cartoon model, but for a realistic model it might be a bit too exaggerated as a starting pose. I mean, I tried standing like she is and I almost fell over. XD She just needs to come back a little bit.
It’s nothing about the legs, by the way, it’s the torso proportion, I think, that’s bugging me.
Anyway, maybe he does contribute to the wiki, and if he does, then I’m grateful, but I never went in for the ‘curt, slightly insulting dismissal’ way of doing things unless the person actually warranted it through arrogance.
EDIT: Yeah, I’ve recently upgraded my modeling technique from ‘cylinder with limbs’ as well, /:]
I see what you mean about the torso, she does look a little thick, expecially the back view. And she’s standing braced at “attention.” Probably the photographer told her to “stand up straight! and don’t move!” Poor girl. I’m planning on making really major alterations to the starting pose. My idea is to put all the joints into a half way position, to minimize distortions. Hopefully I can do this without losing the proportions. Once I get the proportions.
Hi Orinocco!
Looks ok. Maybe rework the butt area and the back regarding topology
uhm i thik i will comment on the make human deal here. I dont think its a very good tool. Its very similar to poser and i used to use it. These body generators, generate essentially different variations of the same model using morphs. So basically everything looks very dull and similar, thats why people use scanners, and model from scratch still. If you want originality in your work and production, and avoid any copyright issues as well, its very much advisable that you model everything from scratch so you can use it in your portfolio, and say “Yes, i made that.”, instead of relying on someone elses work.
Hi Wim! No work on the back side yet, probably won’t get to it until the weekend. I’ve got a lot of topology work to do.
Nick_Meister, I’d really, really rather not have this thread turn into a discussion of MH. MH is a tool. If you’ve got a job that needs that particular tool, then you use it, otherwise not. Obviously I’m not using MH, so enough said, ok?
ehm, btw i d highly recommend you to look at some topology steven stahlberg made at CGtalk.org : http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=108412&highlight=body+topology
the important thing in that pic is his usage of edge loops to define the forms of the body: mind the loops around the pelvisand the legs for example.
hope i could help 
Well, Steven Stahlberg is a wonderful CG artist, and I’ve learned a lot from his tutorials. The thread, otoh, is a sticky at CGTalk, and is 152 pages, over 2200 posts long. I’ve gotten through about 25 pages of it, and found several wires of Stahlberg’s work, and a lot of broken links, much commentary on images that don’t load any more, and a lot of crosstalk and meta discussions on ngons vs quads, which is kind of irrelevant since Blender don’t do ngons… It looks like it was a pretty good thread to follow a couple of years ago, when it was being written, but the first 25 pages were a bust except for the Stahlberg wires.
Also, Stahlberg models in Maya, and makes copious use of Maya’s ngon capability. I’m not complaining about the recommendation, relledom, even though it sounds like it, I’m just advising anyone else reading this thread as to what they’ll find.
I’ll study the wires to learn what I can, and the thread may improve as it gets closer to present day (thread started a little over three years ago.) I just wish the search tool let me find only the Stahlberg posts within the thread, and filtered out the rest of the chatter.
but he does not only model with with n gons.IMO the important part for us, blender users are the edgeloops and the way he empasizes parts of body…
you are right that the thread is overfilled…i think when i have time i ll post the most important in the forums here or i ll ultimately make my own homepage
do you know any other artists who have similiar understanding of body topology ?
keep your good work up, i m really looing forward it, as i m also working on a female body
You’re right, of course. Stahlberg’s wires contain a wealth of information about how to build edgeloops.
Here is my update, working the front of the torso, mainly, with a little touch up on the upper leg proportions. Nothing done on the backside, yet, except to mess it up where loops on the front went around the side and then were not worked on, so I think I won’t show that view until it’s more in order.
As to Blender Artists who’ve got good topology, probably toloban and mr_bomb have studied this the most, and Wim’s work on Elissa.
great work so far…
the only thing that i think needs to be fixed is the breast, it should be a little bit softer right in the middle of the chest…
(is not that i’ve seen a lot of them =P)
nice work so far:)
i ve got some suggestion now. please don t forget that i m just learning, too and that my suggestions might be wrong. might !!! 
-i think that Gabbasss is right that the breasts should have another form, a bit more “circular”
-the area above the knee (see the blue circle) seems a little bit odd to me. IMO it should be more round, because you ve got there a kind of deformation that shouldn t be there …
-a small idea how to change the topo above the belly button 
a little question to finish my post: are you going to use just quads ? :eyebrowlift2:
Yeah… thanks for the crits.
That spot above the belly button kind of got messed up when I was working on the edge loops for the rib cage.
I’ll fix the depression above the knee, sooner or later. I’ve just got one loop done on the leg, running down from the hip to under the knee on the outside. I’ve still got a quadricep loop to fit in and the adductor longus.
As for the breasts, the reference model is thin, so her breasts don’t soften the middle of her chest as happens in women with a bit more mass about them. [Also, clothing, especially bras, make a big difference in the shape and location of the breast mass] I do need to move the loops coming up from the inside to go toward the neck rather than the arms as they do now, which will mitigate that problem some.
I am working on just having quads in the finished mesh.
xould you perhaps post your reference, so one won t give you wrong crits ? 
all quads makes modelling unnecessarily difficult but it is up to you
No such thing as a wrong crit. At least, not on this project. I’m not going for a portrait, the reference is just for proportions. Indeed, I switch from time to time when I’m focusing on a particular body part (last was the abs) and look at any number of photos to get an idea of the overall shape and how the shape actually deforms when the model moves in various ways.
Then I try to make loops that allow me to duplicate the shape, and duplicate the deformations. That’s the tricky part, and that’s why I’m avoiding tris. Quads are easier to tweak, and since I’m probably going to spend a lot more time tweaking than I am modeling, I’d rather not be fighting with tris.
So, whatever you think, keep it coming!
