Was trying to follow Artquests' critiques, though understandably now this guy looks fairly elder.
Looking good so far! Id suggest bringing the highlights down a bit for now, just work with the midtone/darks to establish the shape. The dark lines were more abstracts of facial features. sorry about that :P They represent underlying structures but don't usually show so much on the face of a younger person.
Well I don't really mind much whether he's old or not, I just wanted to point out that if people have a wrinkly face, they tend to have wrinkly shoulders and arms too.
And in this case, the elf had a very wrinkly face but super young looking arms.
It feels like I'm henpecking at this, not sure if I'm at the point where I need to decide to stop "rendering." Unless there's actually more to do? Didn't work on this for two days, took an unwilling break, took care of other things on the agenda.
@artquest, Snader & Stvv: tried to do what I can to implement your feedback. Definitely softened the face to make it younger like in the original concept.
A big attempt with this iteration included adding other hues into the local colors, so venturing into purples in the red's shadows, and venturing into a stronger orange for the gold mid-tones and red highlights. Hopefully that sorta show through. Pulled back on the Color Balance layer on this texture iteration. Does it look better or worse?
I guess that light map on the weapon is too strong and blowing it out.
And the texture maps as it stands. I swear, since my intention as well is to apply for that 3D character Intern position for the summer at BLizzard, the Texture Map might screw me over. God-willing, it'll be a miracle if I get that position or anything close to that.
Playing around with different Color Balance adjustments. The one WITHOUT Color Balance is on the left, while the middle and right do have Color Balance. Marmoset lighting is just a white spotlight to get as neutral a lighting as possible.
In regards to the model's texture itself, I am still not sure what else to do. I do remember warnings from other artists about constantly just making adjustments when the thing is "done" and I'm not sure if that this is the situation right now or that I am missing something else entirely.
looks good - it's a bit far along to change some of the mistakes I see, you should look to a better UV layout for your next model. The face doesn't really need to be mirrored, I can't make out the scar at gameplay distance. Even if you needed to mirror the face a UV layout more like this would be better:
I also think 1024 for a character is too large for WoW specs, I don't think you'll lose much detail downsizing his texture to 512.
I might have time? I have a sneaking suspicion it might be a make or break for the contest piece, since the texture map has to be presented as well . . .
Hey JadeEyePanda, you are really making some progress with this dude! You mentioned not knowing what else to paint in the texture; I made a crappy paintover to give you some suggestions. I'm not that up to date on WoW so take everything I say with a grain of salt
1. The models in WoW generally have a contrast gradient - the highest contrast is on the areas of interest, and the lowest is on the "unimportant" areas, like the lower legs, or the handles of weapons.
2. Another thing they seem to do is "punch up" certain areas to make them brighter, like there was a point light over them or something. In the pics I looked at, it seems that this happens on the face, the upper torso/chest, the forearms, and the front of the thighs. I did this in my paintover by using an Overlay layer with some radial gradients. Check out this pic to see what I mean:
3. You could use more contrast and more highlights in your metal. Some areas are better than others; the shoulder pads look pretty good, but the diamond shaped metal pieces on the pillar, for instance, need more contrast. In the paintover I didn't mess with most areas in this regard, but I did change the pillar and the weapon.
4. In WoW, usually when there is a large flat area there is some kind of painterly texture. They'll often do worn cloth, or cracked leather, or pitted metal, or something similar. I added something like this to the pillar surface and the weapon. Along these same lines, you could use more scratches on the metal areas too.
5. Baking AO into your diffuse might help you some. The most obvious area I can see that would benefit is the space between the front waist pouch and the cylindrical canister underneath it.
6. Check out the elf hair in WoW. They seem to start with a dark flat color, then lighten it with smooth gradients to get the major shapes in. Then, it looks like they mask those gradients with a fairly large "strand" pattern to make it look like hair. I kind of put this in the paintover but it's not perfect; the elf on the left of the linked image is a good example of what I'm talking about. Another thing is, even though this guy has white hair, I would avoid letting it blow out to full white in the texture, or if you do, only do it for very small highlight areas, and not for whole swaths of hair.
Finally, I think the face could use a little more love. This isn't really my specialty and a lot of the other guys that have commented here are better than me at this, but here's a suggestion to get you thinking about the kind of things you could do:
Based on some blood elf pics, they seem to have relatively small mouths, long thin downturned noses, really prominent cheekbones and of course, permanently angry eyebrows .
I hope some of this is helpful, keep going man, it's looking cool!
Wow, you sure did use the space well! Your painting needs to be less scratchy though. Try painting with a large flat brush. It's also important to indicate form strongly with your brushes. Due to low poly meshes, you have to paint in muscles and such. Also paint this character slightly lit from the top. Since your character isnt going to be upside down much. So warmer tones coming in from top light, cooler tones in shadows. Really control your color and color temperature to get a more naturalistic feel. Also bump up the embossing on that cloth!
@Broadway: I have no idea how you painted that texture on the cannon shaft, but I'm going to try my best to emulate it because it looks fab. (If you have any tips /reference for that, I would definitely like to see it )
@Proxzee: Several of the images may or may not contain the lightmap gradient I plan to have in the final texture, but I get your point definitely. Bumping up the emboss on the cloth . . . this might be tricky since I'm not immediately visualizing this.
This has come along way jadeEyePanda! It's looking quite nice. Here are a few suggestions:
It's probably a good time to start working on matching the style a bit better. Here's a screenshot of a blood elf from the WoW model viewer. Notice how the Dark line around the eyes thins out and stops before reaching the bottom? I'd also remove the dark line above your character's eyes as the "eyelids" should probably be covered by an angry brow :P Also notice how light and saturated the skin tones are. I'd do a levels and a HSV adjustment on the skin tones to try to get it a bit closer.
Your characters hair is white but that doesn't mean it shouldn't have somewhat darker/grey-ish areas on it.
A good rule of thumb for color theory is 70% neutral coverage and 30% POP the saturation. For Wow I'd keep this idea but just up the saturation on the base 70%
Also for value ranges it's generally good to stay between 80% and 10%. Going to light or too dark doesn't end up looking so good. Especially if lighting is involved (It'll start to blow out your colors.) But even if it's a full bright diffuse model with no lighting it will still look nice if you stick generally those rules. Usually the only time I paint with values above 80% is when something is emitting light(Like the center of the blood elves eye in the first screenshot.)
Oh and design wise the schematics on the scrolls are really bothering me. It draws too much attention to those areas from a design standpoint. It's all about areas of rest and areas of detail. The face is always the first thing we look at as humans so that area should be the center of attention/details. Everything else should guide the eye back to the main point of interest. But if you really want to keep the patterns, at least make the color a medium brownish color.
Good luck Panda!
P.S.
How much time do you have left for this project?
In that case I would fulfill the requirements of the contest and then keep working on it after that. That way you have something you can submit but you can tweak past that. So maybe rig/pose setup a camera bookmark so you can just re-render and drop the new render into your final presentation image.
Also don't wait till the last minute to submit your entry. I remember having trouble getting through to the servers back in 2006.
@Artquest: Did what I could to deal with going overboard with the values by softening the contrasts on the skin areas and face (using your pics as reference). On my end, I just replaced the dark brown-y areas with the pink I had in the gaunt of the face.
@Broadway: I think I figure out your cannon texture thing? It's marble right?
@Proxzee: Tried to go thicker and bolder, specifically with the embossing on the clothes. It was dirty and sensuous.
The face looks much better! The eyes have especially improved. Now his arms look like they have more of a tan than his chest/face.
and you may have brought a little too much red into the gold. But you are very close! The shoulder trim seems to be the best gold you have. Try to unify it just a bit more. I know it can be frustrating being so close and making all these minor tweaks but it will pay off in the end! Keep at it. I'ts looking great!
Looking good, well done man! It "pops" better now. I'd still probably make the face more elf-y but perhaps that's just my own personal taste. You might also look into adding some highlights/high-contrast areas to some of his tools, and maybe some AO/shadows underneath them where they attach to his torso. For instance the wrench is kind of hard to pick out at the moment.
It seems like you already figured out that cannon texture, but all I was doing was pretty similar to the last 3 steps of this thing:
only more blurry. Even though the tutorial is for wood, those little blotches are an easy way to get quick painterly detail. (and I wasn't sure what sort of material you wanted the cannon to be, I was thinking it was stone/plaster)
Nice job! One thing if you have time, On the Green Crystals i will try not to go too dark and u might want to add a second color. Also on the feet there is a very dark spot, so basically try to get rid of those very dark spots that look black. I like it so far good luck my friend!
Naw. Still trying to figure out how to rig this thing . . . Seriously, it might be an all nighter for me today.
Like a good friend of mine did a quick dirty rig with a script he grabbed from Creative Crash, but I'm trying to figure out wth he did and how to adjust it so I don't get the legs moving the tunic, etc.
Rough pose. Thank God I don't need to skin-fix like crazy since I don't need to do a crazy pose . . . I think. Need critiques! Texture still critiqueable as well!
Replies
@Sttv: I'll deal with those a tiny bit later. Just gotta take care of some odd emails I got today.
Looking good so far! Id suggest bringing the highlights down a bit for now, just work with the midtone/darks to establish the shape. The dark lines were more abstracts of facial features. sorry about that :P They represent underlying structures but don't usually show so much on the face of a younger person.
And in this case, the elf had a very wrinkly face but super young looking arms.
@artquest, Snader & Stvv: tried to do what I can to implement your feedback. Definitely softened the face to make it younger like in the original concept.
A big attempt with this iteration included adding other hues into the local colors, so venturing into purples in the red's shadows, and venturing into a stronger orange for the gold mid-tones and red highlights. Hopefully that sorta show through. Pulled back on the Color Balance layer on this texture iteration. Does it look better or worse?
I guess that light map on the weapon is too strong and blowing it out.
View the 3D model
And the texture maps as it stands. I swear, since my intention as well is to apply for that 3D character Intern position for the summer at BLizzard, the Texture Map might screw me over. God-willing, it'll be a miracle if I get that position or anything close to that.
In regards to the model's texture itself, I am still not sure what else to do. I do remember warnings from other artists about constantly just making adjustments when the thing is "done" and I'm not sure if that this is the situation right now or that I am missing something else entirely.
I also think 1024 for a character is too large for WoW specs, I don't think you'll lose much detail downsizing his texture to 512.
Should I spend the day trying to fix that?
1024 was the requirement for the Blizzard ARt Contest
I shall use this curse!
BUT does ANYONE else see ANY other UV things that would piss you off if this was all done professionally?
That should work
Ok, is there any way to transfer the UVset from one .ma file to another .ma file?
Gonna see what's going on.
EDIT:
Just physically stacked the two meshes. Apparently Componenet wasn't working for me.
1. The models in WoW generally have a contrast gradient - the highest contrast is on the areas of interest, and the lowest is on the "unimportant" areas, like the lower legs, or the handles of weapons.
2. Another thing they seem to do is "punch up" certain areas to make them brighter, like there was a point light over them or something. In the pics I looked at, it seems that this happens on the face, the upper torso/chest, the forearms, and the front of the thighs. I did this in my paintover by using an Overlay layer with some radial gradients. Check out this pic to see what I mean:
http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090131014829/wowwiki/images/2/22/Druid_Tier_Sets.jpg
3. You could use more contrast and more highlights in your metal. Some areas are better than others; the shoulder pads look pretty good, but the diamond shaped metal pieces on the pillar, for instance, need more contrast. In the paintover I didn't mess with most areas in this regard, but I did change the pillar and the weapon.
4. In WoW, usually when there is a large flat area there is some kind of painterly texture. They'll often do worn cloth, or cracked leather, or pitted metal, or something similar. I added something like this to the pillar surface and the weapon. Along these same lines, you could use more scratches on the metal areas too.
5. Baking AO into your diffuse might help you some. The most obvious area I can see that would benefit is the space between the front waist pouch and the cylindrical canister underneath it.
6. Check out the elf hair in WoW. They seem to start with a dark flat color, then lighten it with smooth gradients to get the major shapes in. Then, it looks like they mask those gradients with a fairly large "strand" pattern to make it look like hair. I kind of put this in the paintover but it's not perfect; the elf on the left of the linked image is a good example of what I'm talking about. Another thing is, even though this guy has white hair, I would avoid letting it blow out to full white in the texture, or if you do, only do it for very small highlight areas, and not for whole swaths of hair.
Finally, I think the face could use a little more love. This isn't really my specialty and a lot of the other guys that have commented here are better than me at this, but here's a suggestion to get you thinking about the kind of things you could do:
Based on some blood elf pics, they seem to have relatively small mouths, long thin downturned noses, really prominent cheekbones and of course, permanently angry eyebrows
I hope some of this is helpful, keep going man, it's looking cool!
If there's anything else wrong with the UVs, please tell me T_T
THICK and BOLD.
@Proxzee: Several of the images may or may not contain the lightmap gradient I plan to have in the final texture, but I get your point definitely. Bumping up the emboss on the cloth . . . this might be tricky since I'm not immediately visualizing this.
It's probably a good time to start working on matching the style a bit better. Here's a screenshot of a blood elf from the WoW model viewer. Notice how the Dark line around the eyes thins out and stops before reaching the bottom? I'd also remove the dark line above your character's eyes as the "eyelids" should probably be covered by an angry brow :P Also notice how light and saturated the skin tones are. I'd do a levels and a HSV adjustment on the skin tones to try to get it a bit closer.
Your characters hair is white but that doesn't mean it shouldn't have somewhat darker/grey-ish areas on it.
A good rule of thumb for color theory is 70% neutral coverage and 30% POP the saturation. For Wow I'd keep this idea but just up the saturation on the base 70%
Also for value ranges it's generally good to stay between 80% and 10%. Going to light or too dark doesn't end up looking so good. Especially if lighting is involved (It'll start to blow out your colors.) But even if it's a full bright diffuse model with no lighting it will still look nice if you stick generally those rules. Usually the only time I paint with values above 80% is when something is emitting light(Like the center of the blood elves eye in the first screenshot.)
Oh and design wise the schematics on the scrolls are really bothering me. It draws too much attention to those areas from a design standpoint. It's all about areas of rest and areas of detail. The face is always the first thing we look at as humans so that area should be the center of attention/details. Everything else should guide the eye back to the main point of interest. But if you really want to keep the patterns, at least make the color a medium brownish color.
Good luck Panda!
P.S.
How much time do you have left for this project?
Also don't wait till the last minute to submit your entry. I remember having trouble getting through to the servers back in 2006.
This turned out awesome, nice work!
@Broadway: I think I figure out your cannon texture thing? It's marble right?
@Proxzee: Tried to go thicker and bolder, specifically with the embossing on the clothes. It was dirty and sensuous.
http://p3d.in/JltOW
And the texture map as it stands, this is with the light map AND the color balance
and you may have brought a little too much red into the gold. But you are very close! The shoulder trim seems to be the best gold you have. Try to unify it just a bit more. I know it can be frustrating being so close and making all these minor tweaks but it will pay off in the end! Keep at it. I'ts looking great!
Yes, also on the cannon trim. If you color pick the darker areas there's too much red IN the orange.
And no worries about the "tiny adjustments." If I AM at that stage, I'll take it as a blessing that I'm real bloody close.
Since I don't think I need to make any more mesh adjustments of any sort, especially with the eyebrows, I'm gonna start rigging.
It seems like you already figured out that cannon texture, but all I was doing was pretty similar to the last 3 steps of this thing:
http://gimaldinov.deviantart.com/art/How-to-draw-wooden-plank-267517599
only more blurry. Even though the tutorial is for wood, those little blotches are an easy way to get quick painterly detail. (and I wasn't sure what sort of material you wanted the cannon to be, I was thinking it was stone/plaster)
Good work!
Like a good friend of mine did a quick dirty rig with a script he grabbed from Creative Crash, but I'm trying to figure out wth he did and how to adjust it so I don't get the legs moving the tunic, etc.
Pose: move the arm holding the tool far out... and the other hand could be facing up...
TExture: The critique is above
-dude a question, the due date for this is tonight before 12 or tomorrow before 12?
- For the concept art, are you going to put a pencil one or one of your photoshop ones???
Thanks!
And I'm prolly gonna toss in my final color with adjustments for the concept.