Going Low Poly

With low poly in particular, it’s most important to get the shapes and proportions of the characters correct. You want enough polygons to be able to have a clean silhouette, but you also want to make sure that you clean up the polygons that are unnecessary. Working with so few polygons means that each one needs to be relevant to how I want the character to look. Though having a lot of polygons these days doesn’t matter as much, I try to be as efficient as possible in using as little resources as possible.

Cat Mage by Danette Beatty on Sketchfab

Faces

The faces are definitely one of the main focuses of my characters, and I’ve appropriated a few tricks on how to approach faces from Twitter and other sources. One of the tricks is to model eyes as inset cavities, and use a floating textured plane for the pupil and highlight. I do this by making a sphere and shaping it the way I want the eye to look and sit in the face, and using the Boolean tool to cut the shape into the face. I then clean up the vertices around the eye merging together unnecessary ones and cleaning up the topology. Using a separate plane for the pupil and highlight in the eye, if done right, adds the illusion that that the eyes are following you as the character moves. You can see how I did the eyes on any of my characters on Sketchfab!

Kiki by Danette Beatty on Sketchfab

With Kiki I inverted the normals of the mouth, taking advantage of the polygons only being visible from the front, in order to create the illusion of thickness around the mouth when looked at at an angle. I modeled the face as I normally would, and made sure that the faces around the mouth matched up exactly how I wanted, then selected the faces I wanted to invert in order to see “into” the face. I then extruded into the head around the inverted normal faces of the mouth and created an enclosed space. Next, I created two objects, one for the red interior of the mouth and another for the tongue. I had to invert the normals of the red inner mouth as well in order to be able to see the tongue inside.