Hi everyone, this is my first post on Polycount, aswell as my first challange.

I wasn't really sure about attempting to do this, as I don't know much about Tron or even character modeling.

After taking few hours to gather reference from Tron.. I began to really want to learn more about creating a character from Tron.

I spent a good day trying to create Legs that looked like drum sticks and chests that looked like light bulbs... After some tutorials and staring at 3D models forever. I spent my next day trying to create a decent sillouette of the female figure.

So heres what Iv'e done so far.

So I am trying to create a female Siren from Tron Legacy.
I am having troubles getting down to that 1024 poly's

I got it down to 1024 on the dollar..... And found an N sided face, haha

1022 it is!

So I started doing some Rigging Tutorials and ran into a few issues with my model which will cause potential problems when UV'ing or posing....

1) Model isn't completely symmetrical, as I deleted some center edges to make the poly budget.... So I cleaned that up.

2) Pony tail is pre-bent and not yet UV'd.... I remodeled it straight and will bend with rig, and UV'd it in the straight position

3) After adding edges to the center I busted the poly limit and reduced some poly's from the pony tail and hit 1024 on the button!

why does it need to be perfectly symmetrical? you can flip or merge UV shells even if some faces don't mirror on booth sides, in that case you only flip and merge the faces of the other half that match.

Interesting.... I just thought symmetry would make it easier to UV?...

I'm currently having alot of troubles trying to Rigg this.... Any Suggestions or tutorial links?
I was hoping ot learn how to make some sort of IK handle for the Ponytail too... So I can like grab the tip and have the entire base / joints follow it... IS that posssible?

This rigging part seems impossible.... Yarg!

personally I would unwrap it first, then rig it - thats the common process I always use: First finish the model (unwrapping is part of that) then rig and animate it.

By unwrap, you mean to fully UV it right?... The reason I figured to rig it first, was because I may need to change the model if it doesn't work properly....?

Bah! I am kinda at a road block (face palm)... I want to beable to pose her

.. assuming you know what you are doing. But often you can add creases and folds later on anyway (without a strict tris budget). So just make sure that the shape and triangle distribution look good, then unwrap and after that rig it.
The reason why I always unwrap first is because rigging usually takes more time for me to tweak it right or I feel like I need to tweak it every now and then later. If I rig and then unwrap but then again want to tweak the rigging it might cause a mess in max or maya.

Its all about having a streamlined workflow to avoid irritations, issues and complications.

Ya that makes alot of sence... Thanks for the pointers, much appreciated.

So, tackling the UV's should I delete half my body UV, then mirror?
\That seems like the best way to go about this. Right?

Oh 1 more thing,
Should I triangulate this model? If yes, whens the best time to do that? before UV's? before Rigging?

unwrapping:
how about you just start unwrapping and then post a screen of your UV here, me and others can then give you points on what you could do or how to get the best out of it. Don't worry to much yet about the symmetry just unwrap unique first - post and then get into the tricky parts

triangulation:
if you work with polygons instead of just triangles deep down maya or max divides your models already automatically to triangles. That saves a lot of work as you don't have to build your model triangle by triangle.
Now the reason why some people triangulate certain parts of their models is to control the triangle distribution for some parts that otherwise are taken care of automatically.
Esspecially with low poly sometimes some triangles can cause a hard edge in the wrong direction which is when you sometimes have to spin the edge or just cut manually in the model to force a triangle there.
But it wont change your triangle count for the model anyway, so its something you can do afterwards, like after the unwrapping if you feel like it.

Sweet dude thanks! That's all really helpful. What you said about triangles, I had that in mind when I saw a quad folding in a funny direction (the 2 tris pop). So I was thinking, hmm maybe I should go through and pick all triangles myself, incase that Triangulate tool thing does it wrong.

I guesse my real question would be, does the challange require the mesh to be completely triangulated?

hell no, just make whatever your engine can run (maya viewport, unity, max, udk,...). Like I said underneath your model is ALWAYS triangulated- there is now way around it. Polygons, b-meshes and what they are all called are just frameworks for you to model with that don't show you all the triangles although they are there- believe me.

In 3dsmax for example you can force to show all the triangles of a mesh or editable poly, by removing the tick in the object properties from "Edges Only", this is what it does in 3dsMax:

it dashes all other edges and displays all the real triangles. This means that for example even in maya if you export your model to certain file formats it gets triangulated anyway (not all formats, but back in the days yes).

Heres the starting of my UV's / Layout

im not to sure about the hips / crotch area, maybe I shoulda made it like a bathing suit?

the disc on the back could be quarter or octane turn symmetrical, so reusing just a 1/4th or 1/8th of the disc for the texture area, but that doesn't matter much now as you already squeezed a nice efficiency out of the UV layout.

That's a really good point.. I never even thought of that. A qaurter would alot easier to texture. I think an 8th may be going a bit overboard, as it may make it harder to get that perfect circle.

I'm actually considering re-arranging this now with the qaurter peice in. I wasn't actaully expecting you to say my UV space was efficient yet.

I was thinking there was alot of areas that could be filled if I cut some of the UV's up more. For the most part though, I wanted to try and keep everything up right / straight, so it doesn't boggle my brain when I try and Texture it.

now you only need to make good use of the efficient layout. 512x512 can be quite a lot in your case and it would be a shame if there textures were only blurry or muddy painted.
Maybe paste some photos in the texture first (like the face) to see how much texels (pixels on the 3d face in the 3d view) you really have to play with. With that you should get a feeling of what you can archive with the texture size for this model.

So heres my thoughts on what I think I could improve on... Yet, im not sure if it's an improvement...

The blue lines are my UV edges as they are now. The red are how I think they should be...
I was thinking of lowering the shoes / legs edge. Chopping the half circle into a quarter.
And bring out the arms a bit more, as they jutt in like a sharp knife right now.

What do you think? Will this make it easier to texture?

Just saw your reply after this post.... So do you think I should leave the UV's alone now?
I have 1 more thing to show you, and maybe you will agree that these changes should be made first?

Anyways heres what I got

So right now the back is a bit stretched out. And the unwrap / relax tool kinda distorted my back UV's in the layout. If you look in the UV editor, the poly's are a bit squishy compared to the model.

So I was thinking of doing a planar UV from the back and moving my seem to the side of the body rather than right down the center... As this space around the Tron cricle on the back is pretty important. As I will be coloring a second ring around the cylinder. If it's all stretchy it may give me issues right?

So I could move the seem where the red line indicates, or follow it right down the butt like the orange line... But im not 100% sure, I could use your opinion before moving forward..

Im sure all these adjustments will help my UV efficiency too..

I made those changes, and am pretty happy with how things flow now.
I just need to Re-scale 0 - 1 now.