Armored Knight

pawige

Hello Polycount! I've lurked around here for a long time, and I've finally gathered up the courage to post. I'm looking to beef up my portfolio, so I'm working on a game character. I modeled the body in ZBrush and am building the armor in Maya. Planning to detail the armor and body (he won't stay naked under all that armor) in ZBrush next.

Any critiques or advice at this stage are very welcome!

Deathstick

It's a little bit harder to tell from the back, but from the front it looks like the head is a bit too big and gives the impression that he has no neck. It kind of looks like he's only around 6 heads tall with his head size. People are usually 7 to 7 1/2 heads tall with 8 being for a more heroic character. I'm guessing alot of that would be negated with a smaller head scale.

That aside, I'm digging the piece so far. The armor seems pretty clean, I can't wait to see the finished product!

timotronprime

That's a really dense body!

pawige

Yeah, the body is just a zremeshed down version of the very high poly mesh I have in ZBrush, just using it as a base for the armor for now.
Here are some updates with what I think are better proportions. It was partially the camera angle, I think, but I stretched the legs out some and thickened them a bit, I thought they looked a little skinny. He's about 7 heads high now, (was about 6 before). Thanks for the input!

pawige

So I've been going through old unfinished projects lately, trying to teach myself to finish all the projects I start. Resurrecting this guy to get him to a state I can call done. The hair geo is just a placeholder, I'm going to replace it with alpha cards later. Also there are some weird mirroring issues, especially on the legs and arms, as his body somehow ended up slightly off-center in ZBrush. I think I'll fix that in the retopo stage, as I'm planning on mirroring most of his parts anyway. Comments and critiques are welcome!

Maxilator

I see that you put quite a bit of work into making the patterns on the plates, but I'm not really a fan of it. IMO it's a bit to evenly distributed and noisy and it's hard to tell what it's supposed to be. I think it would look quite a bit better if you have some regions with pattern and some without (Yes, I can see there is an edge border but it doesn't really make the shapes stand out) kind of like this picture I added. 

Raane

Be more discerning with where you put that fine detail.


From http://www.autodestruct.com/thumbwar.htm

pawige

Thanks for the feedback! Hurts to redo that detail but it'll be better for it. I'm thinking something like this:

Engraved areas would go in the lighter stripes. I'm a little bit worried that weaknesses in the basic design are dragging it down, but I'm determined to get it finished.

pawige

So I experimented with redesigning the details for a while but my workflow was a mess throughout the project and I decided that I'd be more productive to just complete this guy and move on to creating a new character with what I've learned. Finally found the time to do so!


Textures done with Substance Painter 2. Rendered in Unity.

Thanks again for the feedback so far! I'll most likely take another crack at improving the textures once I'm away from it for a bit, so any input there would still be very appreciated.

Chronicle

@pawige how did you go about getting the black etching detail in the crevasses in substance painter? did you use a curvature to get it in? by hand? some other way?

pawige

Yeah, it was curvature. I used the MGMaskEditor generator, which gives awesome control over the curvature masking, to only mask out the very tight cavities, then I manually painted out the bits I didn't want darkened (which was hardly anything, it did a good job).

pawige

Got some good texture critiques from a friend and did some more work. Dirtied up the armor a lot and also tried to blunt the impact of that fine detail by dropping the contrast. Also attempted a more interesting pose.