Thug Character WIP
polycounter lvl 9
Hello
So for our class final we are making a character in the next 6 weeks. I have always loved Arnold Tsang's concepts so I was think of making a character based off of "Yo Dog." I emailed Arnold to get his permission. I do have a back up plan if he says no and that would be to make a character that is my teacher as a thug. Making my teacher a thug is very tempting but I only have 6 weeks to do this and I have other classes >.< The scope might be too big to make a character that resembles my teacher enough to pull it off. Let me know what you guys think. If I get enough encouragement to do "Thug Teacher" I will change my course. Also, if the teacher reads this he can email me saying: "Oh my gawd, I was kidding. Please don't make me into a thug character."
Anywho, here is Arnold's concept
So for our class final we are making a character in the next 6 weeks. I have always loved Arnold Tsang's concepts so I was think of making a character based off of "Yo Dog." I emailed Arnold to get his permission. I do have a back up plan if he says no and that would be to make a character that is my teacher as a thug. Making my teacher a thug is very tempting but I only have 6 weeks to do this and I have other classes >.< The scope might be too big to make a character that resembles my teacher enough to pull it off. Let me know what you guys think. If I get enough encouragement to do "Thug Teacher" I will change my course. Also, if the teacher reads this he can email me saying: "Oh my gawd, I was kidding. Please don't make me into a thug character."
Anywho, here is Arnold's concept
Replies
The concept is really cool man, I think you will have your hands-full with just that! One more bit of advice... I think the way the character is stylized in the images is especially awesome. I think you should embrace that and not go for realism but a strong stylized look. When you get to working on the textures and shader, use a half lambert or ambient or something to make him cartoony. Anyway, just my 2 cents, good luck man!
So last night I started the base to start the sculpt from. I need to finish the hands and the face. Thought I would pick polycount's brain with where I am at so far. Paintovers are welcome and in fact wanted. I am still learning what I'm doing so I would love input.
On another note, I put this photo on image shack last night and it got taken down. The only other time that has happened is with my lady base sculpt. Is nudity not allowed with image shack? Anyone know?
Since the character is mostly clothed the anatomy probably isn't need much except as a guide obviously. So I wouldn't worry about refining it too much more in terms of detail, just really get the proportions ironed out, that's the only thing important here.
At the moment he looks way too stocky. I think you want a guy with anatomy similar to a basketball player. Google some images of that first. Then if it were me I might make a quick orthographic sketch in Photoshop from the front and side and match my highpoly up to that. You will find it much easier and faster to make an orthographic sketch in photoshop, instead of noodling around with stuff directly in zbrush. That's been my personal experience at least. I know time is a major factor here so time management is going to be very important as well. You might consider making milestone's for yourself, like what you must accomplish at the end of each week to see if you are falling behind or not.
Good luck man!
[edit] oh yea, and just a word of caution. Don't use the concept at all in terms of proportions. By that I mean don't try to match up to that, because it is being heavily distorted (intentionally) with perspective. You probably already knew this, but just thought I would mention.
I totally agree. In fact, I was supposed to make a character sheet before I started sculpting and I forgot about that when I decided to bust out a base mesh. Gotta get to the foundation before I rush off to the fun stuff. So off to photoshop I go
So I adjusted my base mesh and tweaked it a little more to the orthographics on my character sheet. He's a lot lankier now. I had a lot of fun playing with zremesher to get the polygonal support around the hands and face. Now I can sculpt his hands on the next pass.
Here is the close to finish base:
yea, the proportions look different in a lot of areas actually. I take it you are just eyeballing it, which is fine, but it might help to put your reference up in zbrush for direct comparisions. checkout this if you don't know how... "Grid Image Reference:" http://pixologic.com/zclassroom/homeroom/lesson/additional-videos/
The face is going to be very important so really take your time with that part. I actually sculpted a guys face that looks a little bit like your guy here. You can check it out on my portfolio if you want (scroll down towards the bottom you can't miss it). Keep pushing yourself and get lots more reference!
Checked out you portfolio. Its a little uncanny how much your sculpture looks like my dude! Is that why you took interest in this character? I'm actually really struggling right now with the face. Part of the issue is, since the concept hides the face a little bit I chose Ali Shaheed to base the character's face off of. But then on my character sheet I painted someone else's face
Here's what I have worked out for his face. pulled certain features from a model on 3Dsk and a little from Nelly, haha. My trad. sculpting teacher also had some suggestions for the features that would tie into the backstory I have for James. (Age, attitude, geographical location) I liked her suggestions. The profile still falls apart for me though. something about the neck and chin. Also, my sculpting teacher recommended I give my thug the same skull shape as one of our best life drawing models. Zach has a very geometric shaped skull from the side but I'm not sure this shape is working for James so I might soften it or change it completely.
And lastly, I made some fly kicks for my thug last night. I actually had my friend who collects Nikes come down and give me a consultation about what kind of shoes I should put on him. After looking at the concept he pointed out that my character was wearing Pumas, not Nikes but he felt he should have Nikes. After discussing it we found that Nikes Low Courts seemed like the best fit. Probably too much info. Sorry I should just shut up and show the images, haha.
Here is another wip. Figured I would throw it up here tonight because I will be finishing the highpoly tomorrow and I will be moving on to retop to stay on schedule. I was hoping for some input as to the last things to add. Ideally I would love for this character to have all of the things present in the concept art but with my time limit that won't be possible. I'm torn between investing time in the hoodie tomorrow or in the do rag and hat. I will be adding the hankercheif and I think it is pretty essential to get some bling on his fingers. What do you guys think?
Here it is with all of his clothes so far.
And here he is with his shirtless view for those hot summer days, you know.
Things I'm aware are wrong: I am still missing the rolled up part of his pants, I need to pull out the part of his pants that is going into his leg, his underwear needs more love, and I need to redo the silver chains on his neck.
Critiques and comments always welcome!
I could use some advice. I have retoped most of the body but I am stuck at what to do with the chest area. My dude has two chains on the chest. One is very small and will not need supporting geometry so it will just be part of the normal map. My question is should I make the larger chain it's own separated mesh? If I make it part of the body mesh It will need supporting geometry for the edges because of how far it sticks out from the body. That would change the edgeflow of the body though, especially because the necklace is asymmetrical. I could make it it's own mesh in the retop but then I'm afraid the geometry will intersect whenever I bend/twist the torso. I had this issue with a belt before. I am also curious about the shirt with the chain. It doesn't stick out as much though so I think I will make it part of the shirt mesh. By the way I have two chains. One for the body and one for the shirt.
Would love input please!!!
Anybody have thoughts on the texture sheet resolution? For the class assignment it can equal up to 4096. My original thought was to unwrap it to three 2048 maps and leave the fourth for the shirt jacket and gun. But then my friend told me that Thane from Mass Effect has only two 1k maps and a 512 map for the helmet.
It is a lot different from the original concept but perhaps this is more your actual style showing thru? You could still potentially give him a similar feel at the end though with a beauty render shot from below like in the concept with strong perspective lense.
Looking forward to seeing those textures!
Btw, thanks for the kind words! I didn’t really take a liking to your character because of my previous work, I just thought the concept was really cool and I wanted you to do it justice.
Thank you so much for your kind words! I needed that boost this week. There is always that fear that you are polishing a turd and I started to feel I might be doing that with this character. >.<
I had baked down my textures but after getting some advice I decided to redo my uv layout. In my mind, this gave me permission to put in some finer detail into my high poly sculpt before I bake it out a second time. It might not even be noticeable in the final model but it is so fun to do.
Torch, thank you ^^ hopefully my posing doesn't let you down. It's where I tend to be a little weak >.<
dragonmoony, thanks for the critique
So I posed him in zbrush using transpose master. It crashed (gremlins!) while I was tinkering but luckily I had saved out a ztool during transpose master. I wasn't able to get him out of transpose master though so I had to export his obj with the uv mapping lost. Totally fine because I just used transfer attributes in Maya to transfer uv-info onto the newly posed mesh. It worked fine except on his right shoe. It transferred the unwrap and the uv shell looks identical to the other shoe but it's like the uv edges all spun around. Has anyone seen this before? I'm going to just duplicate the well-behaved shoe and replace it but I would like to know how to fix this/understand what happened for future projects.
Eh, not sure how I am feeling about the last two shots. But onto other finals for now.
And the making progress is very good!I think the expression would be hardest part.
Cheers!
Yah, when you transfer UVs in maya make sure del all history on the object, or else when you move the object, the UVS will move as well. At least I think that's whats happening in the screenshot
I think if you took a cloud brush and maybe a speckle type brush in photoshop and added a bit of subtle grime you could break up the jeans and hat so they don't look quite so uniform in color. As someone already mentioned, that's probably the most noticeable thing atm. But he is reading really well from a distance, which is the most important thing, so I think you have done a great job there. If you more time on the textures, I'm sure you could get him looking better up close too! But as it stands, I love how the shoes, dreads and jewelery turned out detail wise.
He has a sorta GTA vibe going on in that posed show which I really like too btw. Maybe something as simple as those little yellow lane lines and some grime on the road, and a few pieces of trash (coke can, newspaper or something) could really make this look polished. Also, don't be afraid to tweak the mesh a bit after he is rigged and posed. Like just push and pull polys into place if things didn't deform correctly. I know its sorta cheating, but the main thing is you showcase your character art not technical skills for something like rigging which I'm sure you aren't really interested in anyway. That said, his right bicep looks sorta twisted downward into his arm pit. I would clean that up too. Again awesome job!
Sorry to spam this thread with pictures but I realized I forgot to make a sheet that had the textures on it, which was part of the assignment. So I figured I would throw that picture up here too. It's bigger too so now you guys can see the little mistakes easier too, haha.
Not a big deal, just thought it would add a little something to it, and its super picky (none artist people never look for this stuff, lol). But I'm really happy I could help you with this a little... makes me look good since you did such a good job. haha!
BTW, I'm a little confused that you have two names at the bottom... Was this a team effort? That part isn't really clear...