wether he's a junkie or not you are doing a fine job on him man.....I think someone said before that the trousers could do with being a little bulkier I kinda think so too, but great stuff none the less
Worked over the face, I'm getting ready for hair. Also been whittling away at the details all over the body. I hope to finish the high-poly by next tuesday. Actually it has to be done by then, because I don't have any more time than that. Then I'll get started on the low-poly and the texture.
Hey man, ur def straying away from the original concept of the character.
You version with the boots was more like the original, but the face looks more like some japanese guy rather than Kaneda. He is 16 with a chilly bowl haircut. I am a big fan of the manga and the movie and hope to see this as true to the original is possible But if ur doing ur own interpretation that is cool too.
You skills are really good and i'm loving your sculpting process as well as its execution. Top notch stuff
I just typed about 2K words about why i've been making the decisions I've been making, and the internet ate it when I pressed submit reply.
EDIT: Here is the long and short of it.
TL;DR --
I'm not trying to recreate the choices that Katsuhiro made in the early 80's, which led to the design of neo-tokyo, Akira as a whole and Kaneda as a character. I am not that good of an artist on one level, and on the next I am simply not as good a creative mind.
All this project is to me is my own personal updating and re-interpretation of what the story of Akira might look like now.
I know it's going to bother people that I'm playing the foundations of the character. I changed his age by about three years because that's the age I believe this story would be told from if it was told now, I removed the boots and oversized gloves and bowl-haircut because it doesn't mesh with the direction style is going about now.
I get that people don't like this, but I'm not doing a 1:1 interpretation. I'm not even doing a 1:10 interpretation, I'm basically approaching this from an: if I was going to tell the story of Tetuso, Akira, Kaneda and Kei right now, how would I structure it? And, how would that effect the look of Kaneda's character?
___________________
And I'm asking people not to get upset with me for going in this direction. I truly do appreciate all the opinions and don't think I'm the super-awesome-shit, and that I'm not listening to people who are trying to be helpful. I have a long way to go before I can make good art decisions, and before my art progresses to the level of 'any good'. The best thing that people can do to help get me there is to challenge me, and the worst thing I could do for myself would be to dismiss them. My writing a 'why' of why I'm not going for a straight on interpretation of Kaneda is not a repudiation of these people. I still do really appreciate it.
I don't mind where the beard and hair are going. I get what you're doing and if you'd posted it as a completely finished piece I bet people would have less to say about it, but hey, where's the fun in that? Still, I must say from a purely aesthetic standpoint, the high boots look better IMO.
i get where you're coming from, and i don't think anyone's pissed off. it's your model after all.
but i can't deny that i thought that last few screens were a joke, until i read the post and found nothing that would suggest it.
Problem is that while idea of bring it closer to modern day is understandable, some of changes don't feel logical. http://i.imgur.com/5nd5a.jpg
on this screen he looks like a slightly metrosexual fashionable dude. like a stereotypical young designer or something.
it doesn't have that "bratty gang member" vibe anymore, which i think should never be gone from Akira. while the original hair wasn't very gangsta, it also wasn't trendy or anything. it looked kinda like he and other guys didn't care about looks that much.
that said maybe it'll look better when you start posing him and give the face a more lively expression.
Starting work on the laser cannon/rifle. I'm finding it impossible to get decent and consistent references on this. If anyone has any, or knows where I can find some, I'd appreciate it. Pretty much all the decent refs come from peoples home-made projects, and they've made changes for the sake of simplicity.
I'm considering one of two styles. Style a, marked in the image, has separate handles front and back for gripping and firing -- these are sometimes linked by a metal piece at the bottom. Style b has one solid handle, reminiscent of a p90, with holes for fingers. Opinions?
I, for one, am fine with where ysalex is going with this. Like he said, this is "what if akira was made today". His version of Kaneda looks more like a gang leader from today.
Only thing, ysalex, is I would make sure you take this far enough in that direction. Nothing's worse that going for an innovative design, but only taking it halfway. Just ends up confusing. For instance the gun - I'd make sure to give it modern looking greebles to differentiate it from the original, probably also change up the shape a bit.
EDIT: Looked up reference on the original gun, I guess you're already on the right track. As for which gun shape of yours I prefer I'd say B, but I'd add a grip to the curved bottom part on the front of the gun.
making abstraction of the fact that i am a fan of akira ,
i have to say that i really like what you have going on here ,
as it somehow ground kaneda in our ""reality"" ,
i am really looking forward to see where you would take it in teh end ..
ps ..also looking forward to a reinvention of the bike :-)
Hey man, its cool if you want to do ur own interpretation of him I just just didn't know if you were going for that. I do like it a lot, especially the clothes. And since ur doing ur own thing , u could totally go all out on the cannon!
Hey. Looks like his arms are a bit too low and may hinder any rigging for animation. His armpits are really low due to the "puffyness" of his jacket, so if he were to lift his arms in a t-pose style, the armpits would look really wrong and still be attached low. Might be a difficult thing to sort now, but work bearing in mind that when puffy clothing is involved there should be plenty of space around the joints.
Thanks Foromi. I've been doing test poses, but I miscalculated the severity of the armpit drop on the coat. I tested it after reading your comment and you are correct, it is indeed too low for any useful rigging. It's an easy fix thankfully, just raise the arm where the shoulder would be naturally and re-sculpt. I appreciate your keen eye, it will save me some time down the road.
Thanks also Zelenkov, for advice earlier and chiming in now.
_________________
Work on the cannon continues. I'm mostly just 3D riffing on a base model. It is slow going and extremely wasteful, and if I were in a more productive mood I would do some sketches. I modeled it sub-div in Silo and imported to zbrush just so I could slap a matcap on it and take some pictures.
I am extremely open to suggestions on the gun. I feel like most of what I ended up doing was superficial takes on already overdone elements, like the 45 degree angle cylinder off the barrel.
One thing I have decided to do inside Zbrush is detailing the welds on the major intersection points, like the ibeam at the front, where imprecise welding would be practical. I'll also add some paneling and insert screws and details when the body is fleshed out.
I have a couple of suggestions for his carrying arm. Either point the weapon more to the left, so the back side points to the right behind him. This would match the angle of the elbow he has now, with the hand closed later I think it will look even better.
Second alternative would be to make the elbow point more outwards from the body (like when you carry a heavy bag) and keep a similar or a slightly more parallel angle of the weapon. (in relation to the floor)
Apart from that I really dig the remix.
---
Edit*
Paintover of how I imagined the pose could be. Proportions are wonky in the paint over but I think similar angles of the arm, hand and weapon could work.
K, I'm totally sold now. Those clay renders really seal the deal. I think, with regard to the gun holding arm, you might try having it hang straight down and close to the body with the shoulder dropped and the hip tilted the opposite angle of the shoulders. Give it some weight.
Can't wait for textures!
@sputch, I can visualize what you're saying very well. Seems like it would give the gun some real weight, and make the character pose more dynamic. I will implement this when I finalize the pose, thank you.
@Denny, thanks for the input, as you pointed out and sputch too, the gun should seem heavier in his hand. Also I like your idea of turning it a bit, so that it's not so 'front on' into the camera.
Not sure why I'm doing these renders other than for my own frusterated enjoyment, they don't get me very far when it comes to realtime graphics, except that they are helping me visualize things a bit.
Here's where I got with the head. This is my very first half-decent SSS render. Not great, but I won't complain.
Finished the high, wish I could have rendered in Mental Ray with diffuse, but it's out of the cards on this old, memory low machine. No matter how much I optimize, I kill the thing.
VERY nice! I know mental ray is bunking out on you- but I`d really try and get a cleaner/crisper render in order. It might even be worth (in light of your PC setup) to render out various passes: alpha, Z depth- and compile the final image in Photoshop- that way you`ll have all kinds of control, without having to sit through test renders over and over.
Thanks Konstruct. I will try to get a nicer render done eventuall. I did attempt to do separate render passes, but my (way, way underpowered 5 year old) machine chokes.
I figured I had two options:
1 - use low-res geo with displacement maps.
2 - render the high-poly straight using mental ray proxy objects.
The problem with 1 is that it's still rendering lightmasses and geo, so the machine chokes. Mental ray is also notoriously bad with displacement maps.
The problem with 2 is that it has to load all of those models to memory before it do its computations. After spending an entire day optimizing my scene, trying to lower texture resolution and poly count, learning about BSP/large BSP/BSP2 systems, and pulling my hair out, I finally started getting renders. The problem was that I had to lower the memory intensive stuff so low to do it (less polygons, smaller textures, no photometric lighting, crappy final gather etc.) that the renders looked awful.
So I rendered these images out without diffuse, used the high-poly proxies so at least that looked good, did a seperate AMB OCC pass and comped it in photoshop, AND then I ordered a couple more gigs of ram (from 2.5 to 5.5) and a much faster video card. Thankfully when I built the computer it had a nice quad core on it, and I'm running 64bit windows 7 so I can actually use the extra ram. Still, at some point soon I'm going to have to get a new box.
Now I get to take a break for this one for awhile.
Here's what I was able to do with the extra ram -- finally, diffuse renders. They aren't great, but I am 'alright' with leaving the project here, until I come back to make him low-poly, and do proper textures.
Thanks everyone who helped, I'll update when I do more work on him. Also, I apologize to everyone who feels I butchered a school-kid hero -- just my take on a modern Kaneda, nothing else.
I think he's pulled together pretty well now. I wasn't sure about your direction for a while but seeing him there with the basic colours, he does look the part. I still think, when you get back to this guy, that it'd be nice to give a bit of a nod to the original haircut, even if you update it to something a bit more modern.
Replies
Their motorcycle gang is also called the 'capsule gang'.
I don't think they're drugs like we call them, like heroin or meth, more like steroids, and also mood changing.
I could be totally wrong about this, obviously, but that's what I got out of it. I suppose I'm due for another viewing.
Worked over the face, I'm getting ready for hair. Also been whittling away at the details all over the body. I hope to finish the high-poly by next tuesday. Actually it has to be done by then, because I don't have any more time than that. Then I'll get started on the low-poly and the texture.
Face.
What I'm thinking for the hair.
Unshaded.
with that skewed hair and a beard he's lost any traces of resemblance that he still had.
You version with the boots was more like the original, but the face looks more like some japanese guy rather than Kaneda. He is 16 with a chilly bowl haircut. I am a big fan of the manga and the movie and hope to see this as true to the original is possible
You skills are really good and i'm loving your sculpting process as well as its execution. Top notch stuff
I just typed about 2K words about why i've been making the decisions I've been making, and the internet ate it when I pressed submit reply.
EDIT: Here is the long and short of it.
TL;DR --
I'm not trying to recreate the choices that Katsuhiro made in the early 80's, which led to the design of neo-tokyo, Akira as a whole and Kaneda as a character. I am not that good of an artist on one level, and on the next I am simply not as good a creative mind.
All this project is to me is my own personal updating and re-interpretation of what the story of Akira might look like now.
I know it's going to bother people that I'm playing the foundations of the character. I changed his age by about three years because that's the age I believe this story would be told from if it was told now, I removed the boots and oversized gloves and bowl-haircut because it doesn't mesh with the direction style is going about now.
I get that people don't like this, but I'm not doing a 1:1 interpretation. I'm not even doing a 1:10 interpretation, I'm basically approaching this from an: if I was going to tell the story of Tetuso, Akira, Kaneda and Kei right now, how would I structure it? And, how would that effect the look of Kaneda's character?
___________________
And I'm asking people not to get upset with me for going in this direction. I truly do appreciate all the opinions and don't think I'm the super-awesome-shit, and that I'm not listening to people who are trying to be helpful. I have a long way to go before I can make good art decisions, and before my art progresses to the level of 'any good'. The best thing that people can do to help get me there is to challenge me, and the worst thing I could do for myself would be to dismiss them. My writing a 'why' of why I'm not going for a straight on interpretation of Kaneda is not a repudiation of these people. I still do really appreciate it.
but i can't deny that i thought that last few screens were a joke, until i read the post and found nothing that would suggest it.
Problem is that while idea of bring it closer to modern day is understandable, some of changes don't feel logical.
http://i.imgur.com/5nd5a.jpg
on this screen he looks like a slightly metrosexual fashionable dude. like a stereotypical young designer or something.
it doesn't have that "bratty gang member" vibe anymore, which i think should never be gone from Akira. while the original hair wasn't very gangsta, it also wasn't trendy or anything. it looked kinda like he and other guys didn't care about looks that much.
that said maybe it'll look better when you start posing him and give the face a more lively expression.
Starting work on the laser cannon/rifle. I'm finding it impossible to get decent and consistent references on this. If anyone has any, or knows where I can find some, I'd appreciate it. Pretty much all the decent refs come from peoples home-made projects, and they've made changes for the sake of simplicity.
I'm considering one of two styles. Style a, marked in the image, has separate handles front and back for gripping and firing -- these are sometimes linked by a metal piece at the bottom. Style b has one solid handle, reminiscent of a p90, with holes for fingers. Opinions?
Only thing, ysalex, is I would make sure you take this far enough in that direction. Nothing's worse that going for an innovative design, but only taking it halfway. Just ends up confusing. For instance the gun - I'd make sure to give it modern looking greebles to differentiate it from the original, probably also change up the shape a bit.
EDIT: Looked up reference on the original gun, I guess you're already on the right track. As for which gun shape of yours I prefer I'd say B, but I'd add a grip to the curved bottom part on the front of the gun.
i have to say that i really like what you have going on here ,
as it somehow ground kaneda in our ""reality"" ,
i am really looking forward to see where you would take it in teh end ..
ps ..also looking forward to a reinvention of the bike :-)
Thanks also Zelenkov, for advice earlier and chiming in now.
_________________
Work on the cannon continues. I'm mostly just 3D riffing on a base model. It is slow going and extremely wasteful, and if I were in a more productive mood I would do some sketches. I modeled it sub-div in Silo and imported to zbrush just so I could slap a matcap on it and take some pictures.
I am extremely open to suggestions on the gun. I feel like most of what I ended up doing was superficial takes on already overdone elements, like the 45 degree angle cylinder off the barrel.
One thing I have decided to do inside Zbrush is detailing the welds on the major intersection points, like the ibeam at the front, where imprecise welding would be practical. I'll also add some paneling and insert screws and details when the body is fleshed out.
Thanks for helping everyone.
Considered a mild pose and did my first true clay render, just to look into presentation a bit.
Second alternative would be to make the elbow point more outwards from the body (like when you carry a heavy bag) and keep a similar or a slightly more parallel angle of the weapon. (in relation to the floor)
Apart from that I really dig the remix.
---
Edit*
Paintover of how I imagined the pose could be. Proportions are wonky in the paint over but I think similar angles of the arm, hand and weapon could work.
Can't wait for textures!
@Denny, thanks for the input, as you pointed out and sputch too, the gun should seem heavier in his hand. Also I like your idea of turning it a bit, so that it's not so 'front on' into the camera.
Here's where I got with the head. This is my very first half-decent SSS render. Not great, but I won't complain.
Anyways, now to get started on the low-poly.
Thanks Konstruct. I will try to get a nicer render done eventuall. I did attempt to do separate render passes, but my (way, way underpowered 5 year old) machine chokes.
I figured I had two options:
1 - use low-res geo with displacement maps.
2 - render the high-poly straight using mental ray proxy objects.
The problem with 1 is that it's still rendering lightmasses and geo, so the machine chokes. Mental ray is also notoriously bad with displacement maps.
The problem with 2 is that it has to load all of those models to memory before it do its computations. After spending an entire day optimizing my scene, trying to lower texture resolution and poly count, learning about BSP/large BSP/BSP2 systems, and pulling my hair out, I finally started getting renders. The problem was that I had to lower the memory intensive stuff so low to do it (less polygons, smaller textures, no photometric lighting, crappy final gather etc.) that the renders looked awful.
So I rendered these images out without diffuse, used the high-poly proxies so at least that looked good, did a seperate AMB OCC pass and comped it in photoshop, AND then I ordered a couple more gigs of ram (from 2.5 to 5.5) and a much faster video card. Thankfully when I built the computer it had a nice quad core on it, and I'm running 64bit windows 7 so I can actually use the extra ram. Still, at some point soon I'm going to have to get a new box.
Here's what I was able to do with the extra ram -- finally, diffuse renders. They aren't great, but I am 'alright' with leaving the project here, until I come back to make him low-poly, and do proper textures.
Thanks everyone who helped, I'll update when I do more work on him. Also, I apologize to everyone who feels I butchered a school-kid hero -- just my take on a modern Kaneda, nothing else.
I think he's pulled together pretty well now. I wasn't sure about your direction for a while but seeing him there with the basic colours, he does look the part. I still think, when you get back to this guy, that it'd be nice to give a bit of a nod to the original haircut, even if you update it to something a bit more modern.