Barnesy you are tenacious. Having the worn (underlying) metal quite shiny might help sell the effect so I'm looking forward to seeing how your textures progress.
damn this is turning out huh! good job!!
I love the unshaded version a lot better than the shaded though.. think that might be a bit of a bad sign hehe
but yeah.. very good job man!!
Hey barnesy, now I know you're going to hate me for it but Ive got some crits that may help you. Overall you're doing a crackin' job and I know your keen to get this project finished but there is a few lose ends that could be tied up first.
Mainly the size of her head, if you right click to view image on your latest update above you will notice that her head is pretty small in comparison to the rest of the body. So Ive scaled it up in the gif below to give you a better idea of waht i mean.
I've also highlighted a nasty area of stretching thats going on around the hip/groin area that probably could be fixed by reposing.
Speaking of reposing I also give her a more feminine pose in the paint over to, which may help(Red Lines) as well as a highlight of her curves (Green Lines), which rim lighting will fix and accentuate.
Other than that pal its great and you should be happy with the massive amount of progress youve made. Keep going!
Good shout Di$array, with regards to both the head scale and the pose. Also thanks Bek, that should help make sell the metal look that I am going for
I will see if I can get the pose sorted nailed this lunch, along with the scale stuff. I also need to do a quick nDo pass to make some small seams in the armour and add the belly button to the suit then I can get back into UDK.
The textures are really low res in max so that I could navigate the viewport without having a breakdown. (I think the body is 1024 instead of 4096)
I have also been playing around with the spec map so I should hopefully be able to get the nDo details created tomorrow and get her back into udk.
Edit - I just noticed that the neck is intersecting the neck armour and that the lower part of the neck armour needs scaling as it looks like an ice cream cone at the moment. The carbon fiber pattern on the thighs is also a different scale to the rest of the armour so I will get that sorted tomorrow as I am heading off to bed now.
Hey guys , here is an update of her posed in UDK. I still have to do lots of tweaking to the shaders and the hair cards.
For some reason the image I uploaded to dropbox seems to have lost a lot of quality from compression which sucks, it looks really burnt out on my monitors, especially around the feet
Cool update. Maybe add the slight head tilt that's in the original concept?
Not sure what file format UDK screenshots output as but I've been saving .bmp's to my dropbox for my stuff recently, huge filesizes but no annoying compression. I think I tried tga's but they didn't embed in polycount unless I was just doing it wrong somehow. You could also try PNG's without lots of compression.
I can't give you much advice on unreal materials, but I would try and get that specular down a bit in the hair and overall it needs to be broken up a lot. Like each hair strand should have a bit of spec, not like a solid specular highlight like that. With the way its reading right now, it looks like a solid chunck of shiney geo.
Also, if its possible, brighten up the shadows and stuff in the face. One of the main characteristics of skin is that it tends to have much softer shadow. So you might want to play around with the lighting and material for that. There is probably too much fill here but more like this...
Thanks for all the kind words and support, If it wasn't for your critiques she would still look like a man haha
I am going to tilt the head and sort out the lighting on the face then I will get cracking with the hair. I am planning on redoing the hair in strips as opposed to large chunks of geo. I'll post a pic of the current hair texture so that you can see what I have been working with.
I have created a new scene for Nova as the last one was giving me lots of problems with trying to get the playerstart to function correctly.
Here is a screengrab from the new one just to show the face.
I still need to improve the lighting and there is some weird bright patch beneath the left eye which needs attention. I also need to sort out the seams on the small neon pipes joining the head gear to the body and finish texturing the hair.
I should be able to post another update this evening, thanks for the feedback so far
Edit - The teeth need to be lowered too as it looks pretty weird at the moment, I don't know if that is because of the camera angle though.
Been following this thread for a while now barnesy and you have done great work here! Just keep on working especially on the hair and this gonna turn out into a awesome portfolio piece.
@maybenexttime7 - Thanks for the video link it is awesome haha. Yeah that would be pretty sweet to get it in there, I will have to see how I get on with modelling the gun etc.
-- UPDATE --
UDK decided to crash tonight and corrupt some of my map saves which sucked so I had to rebuild the scene and bodge some of the changes that I lost, so apologies if it looks sloppy in areas.
I have managed to do a lot of tweaking to the shaders and materials, including capping off the shoulders.
The lighting is needing some work as when I bake it the lighting goes blobby and rubbish.
Also, does anyone know how I would be able to get it so that the translucent floor receives shadows? I can't seem to get it to work and if I switch to masked or soft masked it loses the soft transparency
I am going to have another go at sorting this out on Sunday but for now I just wanted to share my latest progress.
I could say that the proportions are strange too, the head is still too small, the thighs are too big, the legs are too short... but all in all it creates some kind of balance, at least on the front view, it works.
The weakest point is the hair I think, you could try to do that better. It's too low poly, the texture is not that good, and maybe it's because of your lighting but the hair don't look blond.
I agree with Texellion with the hair stuff, you just need to make it softer. Other than that this is one of the nicest characters I have seen on here for a while, keep it up!
I'm loving it, the only that really bugs me is the thighs, especially the one on her left in alot of the pictures (I assume its symmetrical though). It seems like they really just need to be squeezed in a bit so they don't look so large. Otherwise the rest looks great and you're doing an awesome job!
Here is a small update. I have made some changes to the legs and crotch which seem to have helped
I have also decided to put her in Marmoset 2 instead of UDK so I can take advantage of the cool new features, which are insane!
The hair was sucking so I am in the process of adding more geo to it and working on the placement of the hair cards, especially on the ponyltail. I need to give it a better silhouette.
Does anyone know why I am getting the strange artifacting in the spec? IT looks really jagged at the moment
I think that the error was from having 2 versions of the model overlapping before they added the back face culling to marmoset.
Also, I found that doubling the viewport resolution helped reduce it
I managed to get some time to revisit the lighting as I was originally relying far too much on the image based stuff and had little shadowing. I turned down the IBL to around 0.2 then used a range of spotlights for the key and fill, as well as highlights. For the Rim lighting I used 2 directional lights as I found the spot light wasn't giving me a nice result. I am guessing that is due to the armour and silhouette I also used a few omni lights to bring out some of the reflections that I liked in the IBL.
EDIT - Apologies if the lighting seems a little bit off in the middle and right renders as I just rotated the model in marmoset without readjusting the lights. Ideally I would have readjusted the lights for each new angle but I have errands to run as I am back to work on Monday.
just wanted to drop a line and say this is looking great,
the model has improved soo much since the start, that is one hell of an achievement!
if you are looking for tips finishing touches:
-dont be afraid to add lots of poly on the hair, especially on the front, you can add relax or turbo smooth on the more important patches to get smooth poly strips, i use this as a guide: http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18r5gmq1t1blgjpg/ku-xlarge.jpg
-skin looks a bit greenish/yellow, try adding red in the diffuse or shader color
A part from that, amazing progress and keep up the good work!
It's looking a lot better but I feel like the textures have a lot of noise in them and you could push the specular on a lot of the metal even more. Some areas like the white parts look muddy or something, there is something bothering me about it. The hair has a lot of aliasing going on. I feel like there is a similar issue with the blue, it has a lot of details in it and think the white outlines are not helping, I think it should be the opposite, blue near the edges, hotter and white in the middle maybe. Also there seems to be a lot of noise in the blue stuff as well.
With that said you've pushed this a lot since I last looked:)
Hey, looks better ! In TB2 you can create groups with the meshes and the lights, so you can rotate everything if you want. instead of reajusting the lights for each view.
I think you can get the proportions much better even at this state without having to go back to square one.
The main issue I see is the hip torso area. The hips on a human are very high and if you feel your own they almost touch the rib cage. On your model its as if she has a super wide gap there. It simply just doesn't look natural and to further make it look off she has a very wide sweep in her thighs. Sorta like a massive bodybuilder would have.
Here are some images that might help...
I actually like the direction you are going with making her hips and thighs thicker, but its just too much right now and with that extra long torso (gap between the ribs and hips) I think it just looks wrong anatomically speaking (even if stylized).
But dude, I love the progress here and keep at it! Materials are looking very close, and I'm sure you will get the hair sorted soon. You are almost there!
big improvement here, her grion armour area looks a bit wierd like its rubberised overalls wheras the concept looks more like shes wearing a metal bikini bottom but thats a small issue :P
Thanks for the feedback on the proportions guys, I have started correcting them but my main priority is getting the rifle finished then going back the the character with fresh eyes.
Here is a wip shot of the rifle, still early days. Just trying to add the seams in at the moment and work on the butt of the gun.
I don't know if this has been said before but despite the changes you've made to the model, I still feel the face is too 'heavy'. What I mean is that while the face of the concept art is sharp and angular yet smooth, the curves of your model (particularly in the chin, nose and brow) are more gradual and lead to this heavy look. Furthermore, the skin tone is several shades darker than the concept art. Nova's features are typically anglo-saxon but it's almost if your tone is leaning to a more hispanic or southern look.
Thank you all for your feedback I have adjusted the thighs and made a load of other tweaks.
I am so close to finishing this piece off which is good. It's just a shame that I started it before the transition to the new PBR stuff else I would have modelled and textured this piece differently.
This project has very much been on the back burner a I have been working on other projects alongside it to practice various skills, one of which is painting ducks.
Since there is no way of masking the materials I am having to break off each material into a seperate model which is a pain, especially considering it's a rigged character lol.
With the carbon fibre I have duplicated the model to retain the rigging then deleted the non carbon fibre parts. I then used displacement and transparency to give it the nice glossy reflections that it was missing. A problem a have is that the displacement doesn't seem to push all of the model equally which makes parts intersect, I also tried using the push modifier in max and the results were the same.
With the carbon fibre I have duplicated the model to retain the rigging then deleted the non carbon fibre parts. I then used displacement and transparency to give it the nice glossy reflections that it was missing. A problem a have is that the displacement doesn't seem to push all of the model equally which makes parts intersect, I also tried using the push modifier in max and the results were the same.
Yeah, both push and displacement in TB will expand the mesh along the mesh normals, so if you have some overlapping bits or something it may act a little weird?
I was going to comment on the skin shader but it looks like you improved it quite a bit since the last shot.
The gun seems proportionally off, the barrel is much larger than in the concept, but the gun itself is probably 125-150% too large overall as well.
Hey Barnesy nice update, glad to see you're still pushing to complete her! I agree with EarthQuake about the gun, the barrel is way to big and throwing off the proportions. I believe it's called a C-20A Canister Rifle, so you can look that up for good ref. Here's a few I found myself that could help:
The hair is also looking a bit lifeless atm. Could you show the maps you are using for the hair (mainly diffuse, gloss, and UVs) and if you're using anisotropy? You can set up an Anisotropic shader in the Secondary Reflection of your material in Toolbag 2 (if you haven't done so already).
Keep it up man!
Additional: I should mention that the concept gun is very slim and elongated compared to the same gun used in other concepts, models, and in game. You don't see much of it in the concept (from what I can see) so just make the proportions work well with your character and her pose, don't need to be too strict with getting it exactly like the concept or in the game. Just whatever looks the most badass!
Replies
I love the unshaded version a lot better than the shaded though.. think that might be a bit of a bad sign hehe
but yeah.. very good job man!!
Mainly the size of her head, if you right click to view image on your latest update above you will notice that her head is pretty small in comparison to the rest of the body. So Ive scaled it up in the gif below to give you a better idea of waht i mean.
I've also highlighted a nasty area of stretching thats going on around the hip/groin area that probably could be fixed by reposing.
Speaking of reposing I also give her a more feminine pose in the paint over to, which may help(Red Lines) as well as a highlight of her curves (Green Lines), which rim lighting will fix and accentuate.
Other than that pal its great and you should be happy with the massive amount of progress youve made. Keep going!
Definitely loving the amount of progress and improvements in this thread, keep it up, can't wait for the final piece.
Good shout Di$array, with regards to both the head scale and the pose. Also thanks Bek, that should help make sell the metal look that I am going for
I will see if I can get the pose sorted nailed this lunch, along with the scale stuff. I also need to do a quick nDo pass to make some small seams in the armour and add the belly button to the suit then I can get back into UDK.
The textures are really low res in max so that I could navigate the viewport without having a breakdown. (I think the body is 1024 instead of 4096)
I have also been playing around with the spec map so I should hopefully be able to get the nDo details created tomorrow and get her back into udk.
Edit - I just noticed that the neck is intersecting the neck armour and that the lower part of the neck armour needs scaling as it looks like an ice cream cone at the moment. The carbon fiber pattern on the thighs is also a different scale to the rest of the armour so I will get that sorted tomorrow as I am heading off to bed now.
For some reason the image I uploaded to dropbox seems to have lost a lot of quality from compression which sucks, it looks really burnt out on my monitors, especially around the feet
Not sure what file format UDK screenshots output as but I've been saving .bmp's to my dropbox for my stuff recently, huge filesizes but no annoying compression. I think I tried tga's but they didn't embed in polycount unless I was just doing it wrong somehow. You could also try PNG's without lots of compression.
I can't give you much advice on unreal materials, but I would try and get that specular down a bit in the hair and overall it needs to be broken up a lot. Like each hair strand should have a bit of spec, not like a solid specular highlight like that. With the way its reading right now, it looks like a solid chunck of shiney geo.
Also, if its possible, brighten up the shadows and stuff in the face. One of the main characteristics of skin is that it tends to have much softer shadow. So you might want to play around with the lighting and material for that. There is probably too much fill here but more like this...
I am going to tilt the head and sort out the lighting on the face then I will get cracking with the hair. I am planning on redoing the hair in strips as opposed to large chunks of geo. I'll post a pic of the current hair texture so that you can see what I have been working with.
Thanks again
I have created a new scene for Nova as the last one was giving me lots of problems with trying to get the playerstart to function correctly.
Here is a screengrab from the new one just to show the face.
I still need to improve the lighting and there is some weird bright patch beneath the left eye which needs attention. I also need to sort out the seams on the small neon pipes joining the head gear to the body and finish texturing the hair.
I should be able to post another update this evening, thanks for the feedback so far
Edit - The teeth need to be lowered too as it looks pretty weird at the moment, I don't know if that is because of the camera angle though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtALqAz0CfQ
@maybenexttime7 - Thanks for the video link it is awesome haha. Yeah that would be pretty sweet to get it in there, I will have to see how I get on with modelling the gun etc.
-- UPDATE --
UDK decided to crash tonight and corrupt some of my map saves which sucked so I had to rebuild the scene and bodge some of the changes that I lost, so apologies if it looks sloppy in areas.
I have managed to do a lot of tweaking to the shaders and materials, including capping off the shoulders.
The lighting is needing some work as when I bake it the lighting goes blobby and rubbish.
Also, does anyone know how I would be able to get it so that the translucent floor receives shadows? I can't seem to get it to work and if I switch to masked or soft masked it loses the soft transparency
I am going to have another go at sorting this out on Sunday but for now I just wanted to share my latest progress.
And yes it will be awesome if it was added to fallout or skyrim which I can do.
Anyways keep up the great work, it looks great.
The weakest point is the hair I think, you could try to do that better. It's too low poly, the texture is not that good, and maybe it's because of your lighting but the hair don't look blond.
Here is a small update. I have made some changes to the legs and crotch which seem to have helped
I have also decided to put her in Marmoset 2 instead of UDK so I can take advantage of the cool new features, which are insane!
The hair was sucking so I am in the process of adding more geo to it and working on the placement of the hair cards, especially on the ponyltail. I need to give it a better silhouette.
Does anyone know why I am getting the strange artifacting in the spec? IT looks really jagged at the moment
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Also, I found that doubling the viewport resolution helped reduce it
I managed to get some time to revisit the lighting as I was originally relying far too much on the image based stuff and had little shadowing. I turned down the IBL to around 0.2 then used a range of spotlights for the key and fill, as well as highlights. For the Rim lighting I used 2 directional lights as I found the spot light wasn't giving me a nice result. I am guessing that is due to the armour and silhouette
EDIT - Apologies if the lighting seems a little bit off in the middle and right renders as I just rotated the model in marmoset without readjusting the lights. Ideally I would have readjusted the lights for each new angle but I have errands to run as I am back to work on Monday.
the model has improved soo much since the start, that is one hell of an achievement!
if you are looking for tips finishing touches:
-dont be afraid to add lots of poly on the hair, especially on the front, you can add relax or turbo smooth on the more important patches to get smooth poly strips, i use this as a guide: http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18r5gmq1t1blgjpg/ku-xlarge.jpg
-skin looks a bit greenish/yellow, try adding red in the diffuse or shader color
A part from that, amazing progress and keep up the good work!
With that said you've pushed this a lot since I last looked:)
The main issue I see is the hip torso area. The hips on a human are very high and if you feel your own they almost touch the rib cage. On your model its as if she has a super wide gap there. It simply just doesn't look natural and to further make it look off she has a very wide sweep in her thighs. Sorta like a massive bodybuilder would have.
Here are some images that might help...
I actually like the direction you are going with making her hips and thighs thicker, but its just too much right now and with that extra long torso (gap between the ribs and hips) I think it just looks wrong anatomically speaking (even if stylized).
But dude, I love the progress here and keep at it! Materials are looking very close, and I'm sure you will get the hair sorted soon. You are almost there!
Here is a wip shot of the rifle, still early days. Just trying to add the seams in at the moment and work on the butt of the gun.
Thank you all for your feedback I have adjusted the thighs and made a load of other tweaks.
I am so close to finishing this piece off which is good. It's just a shame that I started it before the transition to the new PBR stuff else I would have modelled and textured this piece differently.
This project has very much been on the back burner a I have been working on other projects alongside it to practice various skills, one of which is painting ducks.
Since there is no way of masking the materials I am having to break off each material into a seperate model which is a pain, especially considering it's a rigged character lol.
With the carbon fibre I have duplicated the model to retain the rigging then deleted the non carbon fibre parts. I then used displacement and transparency to give it the nice glossy reflections that it was missing. A problem a have is that the displacement doesn't seem to push all of the model equally which makes parts intersect, I also tried using the push modifier in max and the results were the same.
Yeah, both push and displacement in TB will expand the mesh along the mesh normals, so if you have some overlapping bits or something it may act a little weird?
I was going to comment on the skin shader but it looks like you improved it quite a bit since the last shot.
The gun seems proportionally off, the barrel is much larger than in the concept, but the gun itself is probably 125-150% too large overall as well.
The hair is also looking a bit lifeless atm. Could you show the maps you are using for the hair (mainly diffuse, gloss, and UVs) and if you're using anisotropy? You can set up an Anisotropic shader in the Secondary Reflection of your material in Toolbag 2 (if you haven't done so already).
Keep it up man!
Additional: I should mention that the concept gun is very slim and elongated compared to the same gun used in other concepts, models, and in game. You don't see much of it in the concept (from what I can see) so just make the proportions work well with your character and her pose, don't need to be too strict with getting it exactly like the concept or in the game. Just whatever looks the most badass!
Hopefully you'll have time soon to finish her off