Garry, the smoking reptileman

System

I'll probably be posting multiple things in here as i work on them, beginning with what i did tonight:


http://mightypea.3dpalette.ca/browse/smoking_soft.JPG

Any comments (or overpaints!) would be much appreciated, especially concerning my meshflow. My goal with this is to teach myself how to build a character fit for animation, so any tips in that area are welcome.
I'll put up some more pictures (backside, closeup of face) later.
The legs and hands are still really shitty, but if you've got any comments to get me on my way i'd be glad to hear them.

poopinmymouth

It looks like he needs to be a fair bit denser all over so you have a bit more control, and the leg area, try to get ride of that six edged vert. I try to keep everything three four or five. Six tends to pinch and smooth weirdly.

EarthQuake

Yeah poop is definately right here. How bout a smooth shaded shot?

System

I know, but is it so odd to start lowpoly? i was thinking of just refining it gradually, starting from a very lowpoly boxfigure.
Here's where i am now:


And there's a smooth shaded shot as a link, EQ. n00b.
Thanks for the comments though, keep them coming.
Maybe i should get over my phobia of dense control cages, hehe.

Zergxes

Work a better transition into the shoulder, maybe some more edges, same with the knees. You want more polys where things are intended to bend. Try putting in a test skeleton and you'll see what I mean.

Count the edges on each individual face- you have many there that are more than 4 or 3 sides which can cause all manner of animation and rendering errors (especially in a game engine). Get used to keeping your geometry clean if you want to work with a team.

It has a nice character to it, 'reptileman' may be a bit too narrow a discription. He seems to be more of an amphibian-man-cow-beaver than a reptile, which you honestly don't see everyday. Bonus points for originality. LUCK!

vahl

I like the idea keep it up !!!

Zeldrik

This is probably going to a lot harsher than I want it to but at the moment it looks almost randomly designed, sort of like you went to town with features like extrude and bevel with no set image of what you wanted which I think hurts the end result.

Pobably not the kinda crit you wanted but it was the first thing that I noticed, otherwise I think its looking cool. Having an easily controlable and low poly base mesh is underated nowdays, it can be essential when it comes to the speed required in a production environment.

System

Zeldrik: well spotted, allthough after doing that i sketched a lot over the top of a screenshot, and changed quite a few things. And yes, reptileman is a very generic description, but when it's late, you're tired, and you just want to post before sneaking off to bed...
And the comment about the ngons is really valuable, actually. Since wings handles those things quite well, i've gotten used to just cleaning it up later, but what you said about working in a team... you may very well have a good point there. I'll try to keep it in mind much earlier on next time.

Also, he's supposed to be an underwater amphibian engineer, which also explains the bubbles. At first i wanted to give hism a fair bit of armour (such as the chin-armour he had in the first picture), but i consciously decided to get away from the sort of things you're likely to do with game-art, which is a very typical sort of armoured up futuristic deal.

I'm sort of lost on how to do the hands... does anyone have any good tips on making cartoony 2/3-fingered hands?