MasteroftheFork's Wip/Sketch thread

MasteroftheFork

[EDIT] Most Recent Pic






Hey all, so I decided I'd make my own wip thread. It's not going to be as amazing as some of the other threads on here but meh. I need a job now that I'm done school, so I plan to be boosting my portfolio. I probably should make some props, since I imagine that's what type of job I'll start with as a junior artist but first I want to get my Dark Pheonix from ComicCon finished. Originally I was planning on making the giant flaming bird to go with her, but now I just want to get it finished so it's just going to be her.

Here's the pics of the high-poly, I'm going to be moving onto the low poly pretty soon so any crits at this stage would be great.

Avanthera

the hair definitely is my biggest problem right now. it looks more like dreads that are molded together than individual hairs. take a look at this:


the feet are a bit flat, and the hands look a bit on the large side,
her shins look like they are broken backwards, just a bit less of a curve down near the ankle.

her knees are way high as well as her breasts.
the meat on the back of the thighs are a bit misshapen, but I cant put my finger on it.
maybe someone else can figure it out.

Edit: her face is also a bit long, a bit wider would help a lot.

MasteroftheFork

Shrew81: Thanks for the crits! thats exactly what I wanted. I tried to take into account all of your advice, I didn't change the size of the hands though, because last time I played with the size of the hands they got completely fubared so I'll just adjust the low-poly.

I decided to completely redo the hair, that picture shrew posted helped a lot. Here's a in-progress shot....I hate hair....

killingpeople

Good to see new work from you man. Much improved over the years.

[HP]

Good work so far.
those are some really weird renders tho, what the hell are you doing to your pics? :P

MasteroftheFork

KillingPeople: I'm surprised you remember me. Thanks for the compliment, coming from you that means a lot!

[HP]: THanks, haha I assume you're talking about the first image. I got a bit carried away playing with the mudbox viewport filters, they're all just screen-grabs from mudbox.



Ok SO I think I'm done with the high-poly model now.

Quokimbo

Looks like Medusa to me...

achillesian

is it weird that i prefer low poly alpha hair to high poly sculpted hair?

MasteroftheFork

Quokimbo: Heh, i kinda see it I think...she's missing one key ingredient though.

Achillesian: Ya I know what you mean, I was thinking of doing smore sort of mix between sculpted and alpha hair. I haven't seen it done before so I'm not sure what to expect, there might be a good reason no one mixes the two.

Here's the low-poly with a bake test. Its just normal and ao, theres some errors that need to be cleaned still.

MasteroftheFork

I blocked in the texture and riggered her. I also may have had fun with render settings...

MasteroftheFork

Here's a quick update on the textures. I'm debating if I want to give her pupils or not.

Avanthera

I like it
everything looks good, and the bake came out well,
I vote no pupils, maybe some energy sparks coming off?
I really like how the hair came out, looking forward to how you build a low poly with that.
good job.

Also: how many tris are you using? what are your texture sizes?

MasteroftheFork

Shrew81: Thanks, its sitting at about 4000 tris and 1*2046 diffuse/specular/normal and soon an alpha. The hair is going to fit onto the same texture sheet. I'm a bit scared to do the low poly hair :x

MasteroftheFork

Okay I'm almost finished. I just have a couple small details to do like eyelashes. Shes sitting at 5103 tris and 1 2048 texture with a diffuse, spec, normal and alpha map. I think I might paint some hair stemming of the head to make the hair look more attached.

Gallows

The lips look incredibly tight and small, but overall it's a nice model.

MasteroftheFork

Gallows: I see what you mean, I tried to fix tat a bit.


Ok I'm done yay! Heres a beauty shot and a construction shot. I realized I only was giving beauty renders, which would make it hard to crit while it was a W.I.P





Now for my next project, I can't decide whether I want to do a chartoony, kind of cute demon dude or an awesome Mecha suit kinda like mechwarrior....hmmm....or I could do some props....Any suggestions? I might make sketches of both and see what I like better.

achillesian

i think if you would redo the hair completely with just alphas and planes you would end up with a much more portfolio worthy result, its really the only big problem with this character, my only other suggestion on this one might be the shaders on the suit.

For your next project maybe a character with more accessories or just accessories?

MasteroftheFork

Achillesian: Ya for my next project I'm definitely doing someone with more accessories


So here's some sketches of my next possible character. I chartoony evil Pirate fellow.

MasteroftheFork

double post :x

MasteroftheFork

And heres some sketches I made of potential mechas

DrunkShaman

Nice work sir, Your WIP character looks like she is wearing a vig...<.<

Everything else looks outstanding.

And thanks for ref image displays also....*cant believe I just scrap the paper if mine is not too fair where as, everyone else just dont care if their images are fair or not*

MasteroftheFork

Nitewalkr: Thanks, Ya I know her hair doesn't look attached, unfortunately the only way to fix it I can think of is to redo a lot of it but I'm ready to move on.

Ok so I'm going with the 3rd design, I'm trying for a mix between the mechwarrior type mechs and the anime type. I'm not great at drawing machines in perspective so I'm gonna do changes in 3d depending on how it looks.

MasteroftheFork

Ok so here's my start on the mech. I'm learning Sub-D as I go

MasteroftheFork

Got a bit more done

MasteroftheFork

MasteroftheFork

Almost done making the main forms. I just need to add the feet, rear rockets, and a bunch of joints. Then I'm on o adding some more detailed parts. For the feet I'm trying to decide whether I should stick with the shoe like feet in the picture, or go for a more claw like foot, any suggestions?

MasteroftheFork

Okay So I think I'm gonna call the high-poly done, I'm going to add more detail like some paneling in 2D. I can no longer render with Mental Ray because I run out of memory ha. I googled optimizing methods but couldn't find anything that helped, oh well. Any C&C on the design before I start working on the low-poly would be great.

Avanthera

looking pretty good so far, my only crits would be in the arms, on the outside it looks like a large toy button, and the inside looks too bare, if you are going to add more detail with textures there, then that's great.
I really like the feet and jet pack, cool detail but not overtly busy,
keep up the good work.

MasteroftheFork

Shrew81: Ya I see what you mean, I think I'll fix up the guns (especially left one) since they are one of the main things you see. I was originally going to add most the detail in 2d but it'd probably be better if I added more geometry.


So my hard drive decided to die I'm getting a new one soon but I haven't backed up my documents in at least 6 months ! I'm going to look into one of those data recovery places, I hope its not too expensive. I think its just the reader or the power supply bit that stopped working so the actual disk part should be okay..fingers crossed...

MasteroftheFork

Ok so I'm up and running again. I reworked the guns and added some more detail. Next step is making the low-poly. The memory issue is annoying, I can only smooth parts at a time. Here's the updated gun.

MasteroftheFork

Hey, so I've been doing a test low-poly of the gun so I can get everything sorted out before I make the rest of the low poly. I've run into a problem with my bakes. I'm using xNormal which has been great for me for everything else I have down, but I'm, getting problems with this. I originally tried to bake the gun with the low poly being completely smooth (like I would do with an organic model) but I ran into errors where flat areas would show smoothing as it would if it was just low poly (with diagonal shadows along the triangle polygon edge). I read up on hard-surface normal mapping, This being a great help http://www.svartberg.com/tutorials/article_normalmaps/normalmaps.html and tried making all of the UV seems hard instead of smooth. This helped get rid of the smoothing errors except it UV seems became very obvious. Lastly I tried applying the normal map from the bake with hard edges to the model with smooth edges but that make things much worse... Can any one help me with this issue? Am I doing something wrong? Oh and by the way, I split up the UVs so there is a seem at every edge on the model.

Heres a picture to show what I'm talking about.

MasteroftheFork

I haven't been able to figure out a perfect solution, I may have to choose the lesser of two evils, the soft normals look better close up but the hard normals look better from afar

Anyways I finished the low poly, its just under 12000 tris, I could optimize it more by using more floating geometry but I decided uv space was more important.

willy-wilson

wherever you have a hard edge like that you also need to split the uv's and that error should go away

MasteroftheFork

Ya that's what I thought, but my uvs are split on every hard edge, I was wondering if maybe the normals on the low poly aren't uniform, I haven't looked into that yet.

acc

You should post the problem in Technical Talk, may get more answers there.

Michael Knubben

Not only do they need to be split, they also need to be moved apart a little bit. Judging by your pictures, I'd say that still is your problem, so give that a go.

MasteroftheFork

Ok I got the error figured out (sort of) I noticed when I was exporting my obj I was exporting more than I needed so I unchecked everything except for "smoothing" and that did the trick. I don't know why exporting stuff like groups, materials, and normals was causing this error (my guess is the normals) Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

I 'finished' my base bake off all the parts, there are tons of little errors I have to go through and clean up, bleh.

Here's a screen grab from xNormal, its using 2 2048 materials and just the normal and occlusion bake.

MasteroftheFork

Ok after along break. ( I was finishing off an indie game with Pixelante Games Studios) I've come back to this. I worked out almost all the little glitches (I just have some clean-up to do in photoshop) Next I 'm going to figure out the colour scheme, I'll do some moch-ups soon.

Avanthera

looking sexy

MasteroftheFork

shrew91: Thank you, sexy is exactly the look I was going for

OK I did up some possible colour schemes, tell me what'cha think.

PS. The game I worked on, Fowl Space, got into the PAX 10. YAY!
http://www.paxsite.com/paxprime/pax10.php

xk0be

1, 2 and 5 are great. I think with the lighter colors like 9,11,12 etc it looks more like a toy. But 1 2 and 5 are all really really cool looking to me. I think you should try a darker blue for 2, have the lower half of the red one black and see how that looks.

MasteroftheFork

xk0be: Ya I agree with you, the darker colours are much more realistic and less toy-like. I tried out your colour suggestions in the next batch too.


Ok so here's 8 more palettes, I'm having a real tough time deciding on the colours so any input would be great.

dur23

I super love number 5. Number 8 is a close second for me.

MasteroftheFork

dur23: thanks for the input.

My personal top picks were 2,4,5,19 and 20. It looks like number 5 is the most popular so that's the one I'm going to go with.

MasteroftheFork

Ok I blocked in the colours. I'm going to try out mudbox for 3D texturing to put in all the nicks and scratches, unfortunately photoshop doesn't work well on my computer for the 3d stuff.

MasteroftheFork

I did some work on my specular map. I also played with the marmoset engine...most of the credit goes to the engine, not my spec map lol.

Tom Ellis

Looking really nice man, those color sheets you did reminded me of when I was a kid looking through toy catalogues!

Are you gonna dirty it up a bit? It might look cool with a bit of grease / dirt on it. A lot of folks into the whole Gunpla scene have a technique called 'weathering' which when done well can add a lot to a model and I think it might work on your mech.

This is an example of what I mean, not a great example but you get the idea:

http://i43.tinypic.com/sxf1o6.jpg

MasteroftheFork

creationtwentytwo: Haha, I know what you mean, as I was making them I couldn't help but feel nostalgic. I am planning on dirtying it up, I am planning on adding chips to the paint and adding other grunge. Oil and grease stains are a good idea too, thanks for the reference.

MasteroftheFork

Ok so I added chips in the paint and dust and various other little bits of grim. I still need to add some oil stains and burn marks by the thrusters. So close to done

butt_sahib

This looks awesome!
Great seeing your progress through the whole development process

MasteroftheFork

butt_sahib: thanks man

Okay here is the beauty shot I did up.