Challenge will run until the end of November
Previous Challenge Thread
The Bi-Monthly CHARACTER ART Challenge | October - November
hero character
Welcome to the Bi-Monthly Character Art Challenge!
How it works
- Every new challenge, 3 Character Concepts will be provided
- Pick one concept to work on for the duration of the challenge and post your progress here!
- Complete a 3D game res model of your chosen concept
Guidelines
- Help other artists grow! When you post an update, also leave a critique for someone else. Share knowledge you have learned
- There are no software restrictions; you're welcome to use as little, or as many different software packages as you like.
- There are no polygon or texture restrictions, it can be a 3,000 triangle hand painted model or a 100,000 triangle current gen model. Just make sure the final result is a game model, not a sculpt!
- You are welcome to cross post on different sites (Artstation, Facebook, etc.) for additional feedback
- Before starting your character, break down the concept and plan your work accordingly. Being able to effectively estimate how long it will take to complete a project is an important skill, especially for freelance artists.
- Your final presentation should be posed and rendered in any real time engine. (Marmoset, UE4, Unity, etc.)
- Don't be afraid to ask questions, but don't hesitate to find the answer on your own - chances are, the answer to your problem has already been answered within these forums
- If you feel anything should be modified or added to these guidelines, please let me know!
Resources
- Polycount Character Wiki
- Polycount Tutorial List
- Monthly Character Art Challenge Pinterest Boards
- Polycount Character Art Challenge Facebook Group
Concepts
Please credit and link to the artists when posting on other sites!
How concepts are chosen:
- Trying to keep it consistently one male character, one female and one other non-human (robot, creature, humanoid, etc)
- Trying to keep the 3 concepts look like they are part of a theme or could fit in similar universe.
- Concepts must be full body and clearly drawn. There shouldn't be a lot of guesswork on what the details or proportions are. Turnarounds are a good thing to have, but not required
- Concepts shouldn't be too complex or too simple to allow people to get them done in the time-frame while also finding something interesting and giving a challenge.
- Must be able to link back to the original source artist to they can be properly credited, places like Pinterest can lead to link rot. If I cannot find the source or original artist, the art will not be used
- If you are a concept artist and want your concept removed or want to create a concept for a future challenge please feel free to contact me.
- If you have any suggestions of themes you would like to see in the future, send me a message!
Replies
Still in the block in stage, but I'm not quite sure how I'm going to handle the melting floating skulls.
Good start, also love the direction you are taking with those eyes!
Everyone else's work looks great so far!
Whee... This is going to take a while to get right.
@MrKamikaze
Those eyes are freaky! Also, how do you plan to tackle that scarf? It seems to get kinda weird near the end where mouth is and suddenly goes from a single sided thing where you can see exposed pink insides/belly to, well, a creature with a mouth that can open.
@MrKamikaze good block out, I look forward to see how you deal with that awkward scarf mouth and the transition!
started today (got abit carried away with the hard surface stuff)
@Kiraitul that head is freaking awesome !!!!
Great work so far!
Here is my update! I'm almost done the high polygon model, just need to finish the lower parts of the character. Going to try and go for a hand painted texture on this one. All critique is welcome as usual!
Thanks! Your model is looking good, what kind of style are you going for? Personally I think the head looks a bit too big compared to the rest of the body.
@MrKamikaze
I like your character but do you think his arms are a bit short compared to the reference?
Here is my update, finished retopology, UV's, and colour blockouts!
Kiraitul looking awesome man, love how you did the coat, I feel like the legs could be abit more plumper, but thats just me
apollo580slam_nine bith of your models are soo good, looking at your guys models makes me inspired to carry on
Next up, rigging and posing. I'll also need to add the huge lance at some point.
@Kiraitul How did you do the pattern on the coat? It looks really good.
I joined this challenge super late, so I'm just doing this character's head low poly and hand painted. I usually just do PBR, but this is actually turning out to be pretty fun! I edited the normals, so after texturing I'll take it to unity and see how it looks with shaders and lighting.
Here it is in ue4:
It's really cool to see other people's process on the same characters!
not done, but i possed him
Here's a few screenshots of this guy in unity, and I really like how he turned out! I used Amplify Shader Editor to make a cell shader that uses an image texture to determine how light hits it, like in Team Fortress 2:
So what it does is it takes the dot product of the light vector and normal vector and uses it to sample colour from the image texture.
(The dot product is the inverse cosine of two directional vectors. Basically, it gives a value of 1 when the vectors line up (like when light hits a surface dead-on), 0 when they're 90 degrees apart, and -1 when they're opposite).
I think the shader has some room for improvement (Like the banding in parts of the shadow) but I think it gave a pretty good result.
Sorry for the technobabble, but I hope it's useful for people who like to make surface shaders!
@Quick Brick The low poly look works pretty well for the model, I like the texture on the hat!
@slam_nine Nice to see you finish! If you still could, I would try a different lighting scheme to something a little more dynamic and spooky. Seems kind of weird to see that character in a brightly lit environment like that
texture update. fixing ao soon
I know it's over but with school and work, I just wanted to really posted it. This was really fun!!
@Alemja Good point! This is still the default ue4 skybox, but turned around to night time. The darker environment makes the glowy bits more effective as well.