Strider (image heavy + nudity)
quad damage
No more nudity,... hit the back button ! 
Hi
Just finished the game character workshop with Jon Rush. I thought I would post the story. The workshop was really amazing and if you are interested in making game characters I would recommend it highly.
The project Jon had us doing was a redesign of a character from the old console days. The character had to have a twist as well. I picked Strider Hiryu, and made him a woman The object of the excersize was to redesign, model and transform a character into a format that next generation games could use. We used a low poly cage and mapping techniques to approximate the high poly design.
Above is the breakdown.
Hi
Just finished the game character workshop with Jon Rush. I thought I would post the story. The workshop was really amazing and if you are interested in making game characters I would recommend it highly.
The project Jon had us doing was a redesign of a character from the old console days. The character had to have a twist as well. I picked Strider Hiryu, and made him a woman The object of the excersize was to redesign, model and transform a character into a format that next generation games could use. We used a low poly cage and mapping techniques to approximate the high poly design.
Above is the breakdown.
Replies
For those who hate renders some viewport captures.
Normals
Occlusion which some of you guys here helped out on,... thanks again!
Diffuse
Specular colour
We had to do some quick design sketches and these are the ones I came up with.
No one liked the winged hat so I had to put the twist somewhere else. The second concept got through. I have always been a big fan of the muscle suit because it adds really nice form reinforcement, and looks cool
I also put in a couple for the eyes as well.
Here is the first rough sculpt.
I have no idea why but I tend to over muscularize. Also you can see the jaw is pretty Arnold like.
The flv (6mb) is here
If you can see the flv here are some picd.
The jaw is still quite heavy and the face is pretty muscular.
Still too beefy!
About this time I really hacked into the body and brought it back to something finer. I also pulled the jaw back and rounded it off. Jon suggested dropping the cheek bones which helped I think no end!
A pretty high density retopo of the skin parts.
With the shell done, into max.
Quite a bit of tweaking because if the verts are just a little bit out they scream!
Oh yeah,... forgot about the mouth it's been in there the whole time. You can see that the lips are slightly parted in most of the models. A quick look in zbrush. I thought they were kind of small so I sized them up a bit.
Working on down some possible spine, sword and booty alternatives.
Just when you think you are there,... you find out you are not! Jon said something about finishing off the shoulder area and I made a quick paintover. Indeed it looked way more balanced, so back into max.
Erwin, one of my fellow classmates thought it would look cool if you could see layers under the plates so I tried that.
Hiryu uses a "Cipher" (a razor-sharp blade, wielded similarly to a tonfa which generates metal-cutting plasma) called the "Falchion". Throughout the course of the game, the player can obtain power-ups, including an extension power-up for the Cipher (increasing Hiryu's attack range for the next few attacks).
So the sword he is using is pretty special. I think design wise the Japanese swords are probably the best, they are light and efficient and have a lovely form. However in this case I didn't think it would go well with the industrial military Armour of this character, there would be no balance. I imagine those swords to go really well with a very handsome character in a long coat. So I opted for a sabre with twin scopes on top to shoot with (cannons). Hopefully it is bulky enough for the figure and souped up enough to look interesting.
Yeah you are absolutely right. That would have been a really good direction to go in. When I look at the original pixel art the character isnt very ninja like, but I could be missing it. This is really a folio piece so I wanted to make it difficult in that I wanted the face to be young, female, pretty (as possible) and visible. Also I wanted to push the armour to the max. If I were doing a Nija character I would cover the face and make the armour really tight,..... and BLACK, with blue spec.
Thanks for your reply.
Cheers
Too many.
Too few (head bang)!
Strange belly!
Getting there with the right bits detached.
Everyone has their own way of doing these and I did the uv's for this cage in Modo and Headus. I like Modo because it is a modelling app and it allows you to edit your mesh along with the uvs, up to a point. Headus only does uvs so you have to go back and forth a bit but it makes uvs fun, it also has a brilliant relax. One thing to watch out for are t-verts. You can check for these in max's xview or if you havent got max there are other apps that will do it but my advice is to get rid of them.
On to baking.
I split my mesh up and deleted the right and left leg on the low poly mesh which is what you can see in the uv windows above. You cant bake out normal maps with copied uvs sitting on top of each other so all the maps have to be baked out with no other parts of geometry present. After everything is done then you can copy the parts and flip them. The mesh here is sitting on top of the high poly which gives artefacts at bake time. The mesh should be going through the reference mesh. It cost me a lot of time to learn that lesson.
And that's about it. Hope you liked it.
Cheers
Great workflow. Reminds me a lot of Crysis character, but the female version.
I really love the nano suit too
Cheers
Yeah they will probably become nono suits
I'd really like to see the Spec and Diffuse pushed to a whole other level though. I think she is coming across as quite flat currently, and some extra hours slogging on these could make good piece great.
Thanks for sharing.
BHJ glad you liked it. I think she is a bit flat too. Just finishing of the platform and will jump into the maps. Thanks for the advice.
Cheers
that is all
Or, well. The crysis'ish body armor felt slightly annoying to look at at times. Due to all the lines shooting everywhere. But, that's a minor thing imo.
Is
The suit is busy, I suppose colour allocation could calm it down and still keep it interesting to look at.
Cheers
Thanks man.
Pics will be up again tomorrow.
Thanks for looking.
Cheers
Thanks for the reply and the direction. My characters have pretty strong features and they could sure use refining. To tell the truth this model is driving me nuts and I am trying hard to finish it. To get in now and alter the head, repaint and rebake the maps would be the death of me
I would like to post the new wip here and hope you will help out with it. Makes perfect sense what you have written,I agree
Thanks again and cheers.
Cheerio Chris
Its done,.....
I didnt think it was possible to get this much getail out of a low poly.
Cheers
Above that is the reason the other images are offline.
Cheers
no pun intended
/demand?
Do you have a larger image of the beauty shot?
Yeah I have bigger images of both,.... but they are on my week day workstation, will post them here when I get back home.
Cheers Jon
Nice hat.
DANG!
Thankyou very much for the advice!
Cheers