Diablo III Skeleton King

Texelion

EDIT : FINAL SHOTS







DAY 1

I started this "little" project today, I do hope you guys could help me doing the best I can, so any idea or crits are more than welcome.

Goal :

- really low poly ( under 3000 tris )
- nice stylisation for the silhouette and texture
- 512x512px max
- good optimization
- doesn't have to look exaclty like the concepts

Here is my reference board with some notes. To be edited later.




And here is what I did today :




Blocking the upper body, trying to stay clean. I simplified the pauldrons, I don't think I can keep it under 3000 tris otherwise, what do you think ? Don't mind the bad hair placeholder ^^.

Texelion

DAY 2

Refined the cuirass, added a clean belt basemesh and started the legs...

blinKX10

Looking boss so far!

Texelion

Thanks dude ^^.

DAY 3

Not happy with the boots, especially the front view, will probably start over.
Kneepads too small ?

DannSw

Great Scott!

Looks awesome man. I don't think the kneepads are too small, but I think his boots could use a little love. I reckon they could be a bit chunkier overall from the kneepad down "Blizzard Art Style" style

Have you thought about armour on the rear? It just seems a bit strange that the back of his legs are so exposed

D4V1DC

What he ^ says.

You could just wrap the leg armor a little more around and leave the inner legs exposed which makes a bit more sense.

Cool stuff and if your looking for anything else after this try to make a character that would fit into dota2 that would be a crazy challenge.

Hey Valve if your reading this it would make for a great contest, hint, hint.

Texelion

Yes you're right, I will add some metal on the backside too. On my refs I only have leg armor protecting the front, like :





Thanks for the crits.

Dave Jr

Looks ace man, may I ask how you built the hair shells? I feel silly for asking such a simple question, but I'm after the exact same shape myself

Texelion

DAVE :The hair is just a sphere in dynamesh sculpted with claytube, it was just a placeholder, I'll do better hair later ^^.

DAY 4

Did the leg plates again, better now.
Worked on the arms. Don't like the armplates, will surely start over tomorrow.
Don't like the knee pads anymore, must change that too.
Added a mustache, looks awesome, but can't keep it :-(

Texelion

DAY 5

Changed the kneepads and armplates ( at least three times XD ).
Added the hands and cloak.

I'll try to finish the base tomorrow, then start the details, so if anyone has something to say about the shapes, please tell me ^^.

lotet

this looks awesome man, how did I miss this thread!
I think you could go with a bit more heroic anatomy though, esp on the shoulders, they could be a lot wider then they are right now.

Texelion

Thanks man, I scaled them up a bit.

DAY 6

Reworked the pauldrons.
Added the clothes on the front side.
Changed the thighs plates.
Started the details ( had a lot of trouble with the "star" on the pauldron... )

lotet

looks much better!

the star looks good man, how did you do it? I always find it hard to do those kind of details.

Texelion

Yeah it gave me some hard time too. At first I tried to draw it in greyscale in photohop and then use it as a stencil in ZB, but it was bad. Finally I modelized it in Max, baked the highpoly star on a plane as an height map in xNormals ( or you can grabdoc it in the alpha in ZB ), and imported this heightmap as the alpha of the mask brush. I put the mask brush in drag rect mode and drag the alpha on the pauldron to create a mask. Then I took the clay brush in dragrect mode too, and just dragged it to "extrude" the star. I could have put the alpha directly in the alpha of the clay brush too, but well, I like to complicate things ^^.

I'll post some screens tomorrow if you want.

Texelion

DAY 7

I think the highpoly is done. Here is a big render. I will sculpt the weapon now.



EDIT : the tuto for Iotet :

SveinY

Looking great! but I feel theres WAY to much symmetry on this armor and face I recommend that you do some different damage on the armor here and there so its less symmetry + maybe pull some of his teeth up and down and maybe have a broken one 2 and some cuts in his skull and so on.

Edit: I totally agree with Cibo make him wider. Something I really regret on my Darksiders skeleton was I made him way to narrow.

Cibo

Something is wrong.
Your breastplate looks nice but the bottom plate segment make him very narrow.
Your chest is to small and your ribcage nearly not existing. The "smile" makes him more funny. Change the crown against a duncecap and you have a first class jester. :poly124:

wizo

I would suggest scaling the head to 125/150% in width, the skull seems very narrow to me right now and maybe make the scratches nicks a bit more obvious to break up those clean edges, otherwize really digging the piece, keep up the nice work!

ahtiandr

looking good and you managed to do it really fast . Could you tell me please how you modelled the armour ?

Texelion

SveinY : everything will be symmetrysed on the texture, unfortunately I can't make different details on each side. But I can remove the obvious symmetrical details, watcha think ?

Cibo : now that you mention it, yeah the cuirass could be wider, I'll change that. And a skull is always smiling. Dead are happy.

wizo : I'll do that.

ahtiander : some pieces are extracted from a sphere ( cuirass, pauldrons ), sometimes I sculpt a "basemesh", then I do a quick really lowpoly retopo and rework it in max, add a shell, champfers and turbosmooth. Sometimes I mod in Max with a model sheet ( for the thigh plates for example, I drew the shape on the side view ) and use an FFD box to bend.

Di$array

Hey Texelion

It's great to see the progress you've made on your new project and with the suggestion f making it a tad wider will really make the difference. It’s sad that you will be mirroring on side on the texture so you cannot add additional scratches, etc. But that’s the price of getting a decent resolution on a 512 map.

So in order to break up that symmetry by maybe having certain plates of armour sag due to time and wear, for example you could have a pauldron dropping to one side more than the over side. Same could be said for the kneepad and so on.

The cape could use some attention such as holes and tears (unless you plan on adding them using an alpha map later on?)

Keep it up!

Andy H

Awesome work here! Was curious, what matcap are you using while working with this piece? It works really well with your polypaint! I have to agree with Di$array about the cape, it's very clean at the moment and could use some attention.

Texelion

Di$array : yeah I could put some assymetry in the lowpoly later, sure. I'll try the cape in alpha first ( it' a pain to sculpt this king of stuff ), if it doesn't look good I'll try to sculpt it.

Andy : it's a matcap shared for free by Orb some time ago. I think you can find it on his site or blog.

DAY 8

Finished to sculpt the... mace ? It's a mace ?

Texelion

DAY 11

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU !!!

I can't figure out the problem with the symmetry and Marmoset, here are asome screens, maybe somebody could help :



Romy helped me fix the problem, he taught about the normals of the lowpoly used for baking : as I only use half the mesh, the normals on the seam aren't right. So I corrected this and rebaked with right locked normals, so the normals on the seam are the same on the split mesh and the whole mesh. But it doens't change anything !

Also, it's really strange that the problem almost disapears when the sunlight in Marmoset is off and I only use a spotlight...

We don't think that the problem comes frome the mesh or the normal map, UDK proves that it's OK.

Plase halp ?

jinn15

hey tex, lookin good so far but i think that axe, mace... mace? XD could use more love, i think right now it looks a bit too... perfect although theres scratches and etc... the over all silhouette is too clean, the edges are still all super nice and straight, so i think bangin it up and make it look as if it... well belongs to an old, dead skeleton king would do the trick

and for the normals problem, delete half the mesh, and instead of locking the normals, maybe unlock it, and duplicate over, combine, merge verts... yadi yada and see if that works, i had a weird normals issue before too (not this in particular) but a friend told me to unlock the normals and it fixed my issue so maybe itll fix yours?

Xenobond

Have you tried yet exporting with the same settings you have, but instead of quads being selected, use Tris? I know that I have to do this when I'm exporting out obj's for ddo (which uses marmoset for the 3d viewport)

Texelion

Using tris doesn't change a thing unfortunately. But I asked in the technical forum and MrNinjutsu found the problem : the mirrored UV's have to be offset by 1 out of the UV square. I tried this and it works fine ^^.

Jinn15 : I agree with you for the axe. I will only bake one blade to take less UV space, so I guess I will add some destroyed details directly in the mesh. I didn't want to do that earlier because I will duplicate the blade, and I thought that it would be strange to have 4 blades with the exact same missing chunks.

Anyway, I wanted to do the character with less than 3000 tris, but I can't go below 4000. I guess I've put to much unmerged stuff, and the shapes are too complicated.

I really want to do some nice HD version with 15 000 tris and a 2048 map too ^^. Maybe later...

Texelion

DAY 13

Working on the texture. I wanted to do a more colorful version, what do you think ? It's still wip and I had to move the pauldrons because I put the arms in T-pose, I'll put them back later. Only the metal, belt and straps are textured.



Any thought ?

Texelion

DAY 14

Finally I went for the dark grey, looks better.
I tried Mixamo auto-rig, it's awesome.
The character is currently under 4000 tris.



Here is the flat. Lot of baked lighting with AO and bent normals modified by gradient maps. It's a bit dark I think...



Will reduce in 512 later.

Now I'll finish the weapon, and do this as a base I guess :



Any feedback ?

valuemeal

is it just me or does he seem too short?
Perhaps elongate his legs, also make his hands, shoulder pad and feet much bigger.

Someone who works at blizzard told me that almost everything has humongous hands and feet there.

Also I think his skull should have a tin of brown instead of being pure white you know?

Andy H

Really liking the diffuse! I would suggest that you try editing the curves just a bit. I think it would be nice if there was perhaps some painted in top down lighting, or rather a little gradient to where the upper half is lighter than the lower half; just a suggestion though.

Texelion

Valuemeal : I think you're right, he seems too short. people told me that he was not large enough, so I made him larger, but now he looks short ^^. He's already skinned and rigged, I'll try to change the lenght and size of the bones.

For the feet and hands, I think WOW and Diablo don't have the same art style. In WOW the hands and feet are really big, but the characters in Diablo are more realistic. Bigger handplates would be better though.

Andy : I'll re-work the prelighting a bit.

DAY 15 :

Textured the weapon. Yeah I know it's not old and dirty, but look at the one ingame, it's clean ^^.
It's a 512, I'll reduce in 256 later.

Texelion

DAY... whatever, don't remember.

Final preview before the final shots. Will try TB2 ^^.

tynew

I was looking at this for a while before I noticed why it looked so odd. Looks like you forgot King Leoric's beard! Good job on the rest of it though

Scythe

Looking nice so far. Agreed with the beard, and i think you should saturate the colors a little bit more

Texelion

I had this little voice telling me "you forgot something, you forgot something" since the begining... now I know : it was the beard ^^.

- added the beard
- scaled up the weapon handle, the pauldron and the handplates
- feet are slightly longer
- reworked the slab texture ( removed some details, changed the hue/saturation )
- added some lights to bring more colors and saturation



Still not finished. I just had a stupid idea for Christmas, I have to try it out ^^ ( not really hard to guess what it is... ).

Texelion

I think it's done :

spiderDude

Good job! :thumbup:

wizo

great job, texture are beautiful and very clean topo, could fit right in the game! gratz!

lotet

hey congrats of finnishing this one up! looks great

my only crit is the pose, it looks a little "girlish".

Texelion

Yeah I was thinking the same ^^. I guess I'm used to pose female characters.

Optinium

Yeah the pose is a bit camp It's a really nice piece of work though
My main crit is the brightness of the legpads/kneeguards, it's similar to the rest of the model and it's fighting for my eyes.

I'd darken the legs, change the stance and maybe add some more blue/cyan to the diffuse more like the D3 model seems to have. I'd also like to see an 'intended game distance' shot to vs the D3 original just for kicks

Great piece of work Texelion.