Self Portrait

Jsander

Hi All! I'm fairly new around here, and this is my first post. I'm a new graduate, looking for my first job in the games industry, hoping to get into character modeling.

For my first post, I wanted to show a little of the project I'm working on, close to finishing up. This is a self-portrait character of myself, a simple design, intended to be as accurate as I can make it. Modeling, texturing, and rigging is all done by me. I am currently working on a set for showing him off inside of UDK.

I'd love to hear some of your thoughts!

DWalker

I think the facial structure could use some work. The cheek bones seem a bit more prominent in the reference, and the underside of the jaw could use some firming-up.

The skin overall needs work. It should be much pinker and a bit more pale.

The texture of the clothing - most notably the shirt and sweatshirt - is much coarser than the reference. The weave for most clothing should be barely noticeable at the given viewing distances.

oXYnary

What program did you use? Did you have a perspective view you were looking at while creating or just orthographic? From what I am seeing it looks like you used orth views alone which has created a character without definition. Take that into zbrush and put perspective on. Look at the outlines, he is mostly rounded. We aren't seeing the underlying bone and muscle.

Your specular is too high and without enough noise on the skin.

[Deleted User]

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snake85027

I think the skin has to much of a plastic feel to it, did you use a spec map or just turn up the specular settings on the material?

Jsander

DWalker wrote: »

I think the facial structure could use some work. The cheek bones seem a bit more prominent in the reference, and the underside of the jaw could use some firming-up.

The skin overall needs work. It should be much pinker and a bit more pale.

The texture of the clothing - most notably the shirt and sweatshirt - is much coarser than the reference. The weave for most clothing should be barely noticeable at the given viewing distances.

The skin is something I'm tweaking. It should be pinker; the materials I'm building in UDK will reflect this. As for the clothing weave, I can scale it back. Thanks!

Jsander

oXYnary wrote: »

What program did you use? Did you have a perspective view you were looking at while creating or just orthographic? From what I am seeing it looks like you used orth views alone which has created a character without definition. Take that into zbrush and put perspective on. Look at the outlines, he is mostly rounded. We aren't seeing the underlying bone and muscle.

Your specular is too high and without enough noise on the skin.

I used ZBrush to sculpt and Maya for UV's. I only showed the front reference; I have photos from all angles that I used.

Jsander

TeriyakiStyle wrote: »

Welcome to the meat grinder! And props for posting and getting started.

I'd advise picking a target engine and quality level you want to achieve. Example: UDK - Drakes fortune quality.

I'd say for now try getting into Marmoset or UDK and get some better material definition. Skin, cloth etc.

Show Texture sheets and wireframe.

Thanks! I'm looking forward to becoming more active in the community. This is a first step.

These renders are Maya screenshots. Maya's viewport isn't the greatest. I'm building for UDK, I'll post some updates once I get those shaders working.

I've thought about trying out Marmoset; my instructors weren't too keen on using Marmoset, they wanted us to use UDK entirely. Marmoset seems to offer a much quicker path to getting good-looking renders; UDK is massive and complex, and takes hours of tweaking to get something to look good. What are your thoughts?

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Jsander

Some updates from today's work session, working within UDK in the vignette I'm building for the character. Still some work to do on the shaders, but I think the skin tones are looking a lot better. Also, a shot of the wireframe.

On my next pass I'm going to tone down the cloth texture. Now that DWalker mentioned it, it's starting to bug me.