Tutorial Flux Studio making a low polygon single mesh avatar
From Flux Developer Wiki
Tutorial 1 : Making a Single Mesh Avatar
Caveat : This tutorial is for those who have already gotten acquainted with the various modelling tools, and names of the tools. Please see other tutorials for basic guides to the modeling tools.
1. Use Create > Create Sculpted Surface or Nurbs and place the shape in the scene. This then opens a new window, which is the Cross_Section_Editor
2. Ensure Snap to grid is on and the grid is visable, View > grid > Snap to Grid and View > grid > Show Working Grid. Or use the buttons on the window's toolbar.
3. Zoom in on the middle half of the grid.
4. Make a rough ellipse with 12 points, using Snap grid option so they are evenly spaced. Click the Move icon if you need to move a badly placed point, then go back to using the Add to End icon Click the Close icon to complete the line joining the last two points.
5. Click Update Solid and Close window.
6. In the properties for the new SculptedSurface1 open the right most tab "SculptedSurface: SculptedSurface1".
7. Hit the Edit Spine button and then the up arrow to switch to the top most face.
8. Hit the Insert Vertebra After button 8 times. If the shape appears inside out then untick Ccw.
9. Arrange the vertebrae so they are approximately at the desired levels of head, neck, shoulder, waist, hip. We'll see about legs in a moment.
10. Using the 2-views Front and Left, scale and translate the cross sections of vertebrae to get a human shape. Remember to uncheck "Uniform scale" in the Scale tab to get different scale ratios in different axis.
11. Let's worry about the legs.
At one vertebra below the hip, at the level of the junction of legs with the body, use Edit Cross Section. You would be viewing a cross section of the body , top-down. So the left part of the cross section is actually the beginning of the right thigh.
Insert two extra vertices as shown below, and start moving them toward the horizontal axis.
Do samewise for the left thigh. Then, arrange the other vertices so they are more evenly spaced, and the angles are more similar (roughly 60°, enough for the standard Smooth solid feature). You get the barbell shaped cross section below.
note: In another try, you may want to use a 18 vertices body cross section to get smoother solids, but my experience is once you've textured it, 12 is enough, and you have less vertices to worry about.
So now you get the cross section of the 2 legs, except they're still linked by a line. That will create a surface when we finish editing the cross sections.
13. Select the vertebra lower down and use the Edit Cross Section and Paste X section buttons to make them the same. You may want to spread the legs apart, because when you will later animate the Mesh, you dont want the 2 h-anim Sphere-of-influence (SOI) to be too close together, as vertices in one limb may be affected by movements given to the other limb.
14. Using the Edit Spine buttons, insert vertebrae that will be at knee level (for optimal bending of solid, you better place 2 vertebrae there) , at shin level (the meaty part behind your tibia), start of Boot level (if you want boots), ankle level.
15. At the junction of the body and the 2 legs, pick and move all 4 vertices that form the inner part of thighs, to one same place. Use Snap grid will make it easier, the vertices (actually points on the Xsect) will all snap to one point of the grid.
16. For the ankles, use Rotate and continue adding vertebrae to make the feet (or boots) .
17. Let's take care of some unfinished business. As you recall, each cross section for the leg parts still has a line connecting the two legs. Let's take that out.
18. Tools > Convert to Indexed Face Set. Then open the Mesh Editor tab, 2nd from the right, and hit the Edit mesh button.
19. Holding Shift (to select only triangles) and Control (to add to selection) , select the faces between the legs. Then hit Delete.
20. Flip the mesh over, make sure all faces that should not be there have been removed.
to be continued.
