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Retrogasm 2018 - Zoe Payne: SSX Tricky

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HarlequinWerewolf polycounter
SSX Tricky was one of my favourite games as a kid especially cos it was local multiplayer! Zoe was by far my favourite character so I want to try my hand at giving her an up-res (Yes I know SSX exists, I'm not even bothering with it :tongue:
) I'm going to take this as an opportunity to try a PBR character for the first time as well as improve my general anatomy if I can. 

Final:



Zoe Payne:

          

First WIP:

  

Right now her arms are too skinny and her butt needs some work so I'll get started on a paintover soon. Also, I'm ignoring her hands, feet and face until I get the proportions the way I want them. 

Critique is greatly appreciated!

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  • HarlequinWerewolf
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    HarlequinWerewolf polycounter
    Quick update on the body. I updated my proportions a little and tidied other stuff up so it's pretty much there.



    Now I'm thinking about the outfit. I went through Zoe's outfits from SSX Tricky (and then actually played it for a while :tongue: ) I've got some ideas about how I want to incorporate her style into the new model so next up is a bunch of paintovers!


  • HarlequinWerewolf
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    HarlequinWerewolf polycounter
    Pretty happy with the body and the face took a few attempts but I think I got there. And managed to rough in a really really rough block of the clothes which may change a little....


  • HarlequinWerewolf
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    HarlequinWerewolf polycounter
    Plugging away at the clothes little by little. Changed them up a bit and went back to the leather 'bolero' type thing from one of her outfits in the game. Still not sure how I'm going to tackle the boots. I thought about modelling them in Maya and then just bring them in to Zbrush and adding detail but I'm not sure... :neutral:


  • gibbon3000
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    gibbon3000 polycounter lvl 10
    Nice work so far! I like the character choice. I'm a fan of characters with stompy boots. Blocking out the boot shape in Maya and bringing them in to Zbrush should work fine.

    Only crit might be to watch the draught / profile of her face. From the look of the 3/4 view her chin / mouth might be a bit far forwards.

    You look like you're on the right trajectory for a great piece. Nice work!
  • HarlequinWerewolf
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    HarlequinWerewolf polycounter
    @gibbon3000 Hi! Thanks for the critique. Yeah, I think I'm going to block out the boot in Maya and then take it into ZBrush.

    About the face, I tweaked it a little but there's still something not quite right about the profile. I think it's in the chin but I'm not entirely sure what I should be changing. Any tips would be great! Thanks!


  • HarlequinWerewolf
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    HarlequinWerewolf polycounter
    Another update of the clothes. I need to get working on these boots now!


  • gibbon3000
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    gibbon3000 polycounter lvl 10
    Hey, coming along nicely!

    Decided to share my thoughts using the smudge tool and a gif.



    I like lists :

    • Lifting and softening her cheeks/cheekbone
    • filling in cheeks a little more
    • moving hair-line down a little
    • lifting jaw-line a little and modifying it to a more 'kite shield' shape
    • bringing chin back a little, slightly smaller and rounded
    • Raising corners of the mouth a little to avoid 'fishmouth' resting postiton
    • Filling in upper outer part of brow / orbit for lacrimal / tear gland
    Most of these are reinforcement of feminine features. A really good resource for sculpting faces are the two books about sculpting portraits by Philipe Faraut. He also has a 3rd book on the whole body. He covers these sorts of features in a very useful way - even for 3D modellers.
  • HarlequinWerewolf
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    HarlequinWerewolf polycounter
    @gibbon3000
    Thanks so much! I'll get messing with the face as soon as :smile:
  • HarlequinWerewolf
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    HarlequinWerewolf polycounter
    Little update. I gave her face a once over but I think I might come back to it again. Gave her some boots and goggles and tweaked her trousers to be closer to the ref. Now I need to go over everything and finish up detailing 

  • HarlequinWerewolf
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    HarlequinWerewolf polycounter
    Still not totally finished the high poly but I wanted to try out retopology as I've never really done much of it before other than a little lesson in Maya. So I spent some time today trying to learn 3D Coat for unwrapping and baking. It also turns out I'm pretty rubbish at unwrapping cos I tried some Normal map bakes and they didn't turn out that well...




    I'm rendering with Arnold in Maya just now and have the normal map set to Object space normals as it look a little better than tangent space normals although, bump looked pretty OK as well. But I am getting hard edges throughout the object.

    Any tips in baking would be super appreciated!
  • HarlequinWerewolf
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    HarlequinWerewolf polycounter
    OK, I set everything up to bake for Unity and I think I got the normals working properly now... I think.



    Now that I think I understand the workflow, time to go back and finalise the high poly and start retopoing for real :wink:  
  • HarlequinWerewolf
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    HarlequinWerewolf polycounter
    Calling the high poly done for now. Updated the face and torso as well as getting rid of the belt cos it didn't match the original character design and was ruining the flow for me.

    And back to learning how to retopo and texture!

  • HarlequinWerewolf
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    HarlequinWerewolf polycounter
    Hey, it's been a while! I've been busy learning how to use 3D Coat and learning how to retopologise a mesh so that's been fun! I also did normal bakes to see how everything loaded into Unity and also learn how that works. 3D Coat has been great, but I'm not entirely getting the unwrap results I want so I might take it back into Maya if I don't find the motivation to learn more about the software. 



    Lots more to learn and a lot of work to do if I want to finish on time... doubtful :tongue:

  • gibbon3000
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    gibbon3000 polycounter lvl 10
    It's coming along nicely!

    On normals; for characters / animated / deforming things you should get used to using tangent-space normals.

    http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Normal_Map_Technical_Details#Tangent-Space_vs._Object-Space

    Also a great crash-course on normals and manipulating them was the Varga tutorial from quite a while back.

    http://www.paultosca.com/makingofvarga.html

    Though newer tools are around that might mean you never have to fiddle with them directly in photoshop, I think there's still some value in knowing it's possible and how to go about it when you find a situation where it's useful.
  • gibbon3000
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    gibbon3000 polycounter lvl 10
    Getting nice normal bakes usually involves

    > enough edge / bleed padding around UV islands
    > decent projection cage
    > appropriate hard / soft edge normals on the low-poly model (usually hard around edges that define UV islands, soft elsewhere works a treat)
    > enough bevels where appropriate / not too much angle change across single polygons of the low-poly compared to the high-poly
  • HarlequinWerewolf
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    HarlequinWerewolf polycounter
    @gibbon3000
    Thank you so much! It's great to get some advice on this, I've definitely learnt a lot since my initial bakes and I've been using Tangent Space Normals since as I had found that wiki page on Normals too. That Making of page is fantastic and has soooo much info so thank you again for sharing. I'll definitely need to keep practising but thanks for putting me on the same track.
  • HarlequinWerewolf
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    HarlequinWerewolf polycounter
    Digging up this old topic because I finally have some time to try and finish this. But I've also imposed my own kind of deadline so... who knows what will happen! As of late I've been trying out Substance Painter as I haven't done a lot of texturing before. It's super fun, I'm really enjoying it.



    I've also tried hair cards for the first time and this is about my 3rd or 4th attempt of trying to get them right. I'm happy enough with the placement but might come back to the actual textures.



    So now it's just trying to tidy and finish everything!



    And I know my UVs are bad, it's something I'll maybe have time to fix in the future...
  • HarlequinWerewolf
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    HarlequinWerewolf polycounter
    Calling this done. Might come back to it at some point but for now I'm happy to have learnt what I have and move on to some new projects: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/na38o





  • HarlequinWerewolf
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