Pigman/Warthog - Frist time. Crit me!
polycounter lvl 5
Hey guys,
I'm new around these parts! This will officially be my first post, so I guess I'll jump right into it.
I'm going through school right now, and this is my first character mesh. This was a project assigned to create a sort of half-man, half-animal. Along with that, a distinctive time period. Had to be an African mammal in the Ancient Egyptian time period. 3k for the low, 7k for the high.
Tell me what you think, and crit away. :poly124:
Sculpt shots:
So, yeah. Along with this being my first character, it was my first time using Mudbox and TopoGun. Lots of "firsts" in this thread. All textures were hand painted(in Mudbox, then baked out in TopoGun).
You can see in the sculpts that I had a skirt to go along with him, but I decided to keep it out of the Marmoset renders so you guys could see him better. It does help sell the "Egyptian" motif, but I figured you could just see it in the sculpt shots.
I did have a Kopesh weapon and Shield to go along with it and had base meshes made, sculpted, and textured, but left them out of the retopo process as I was pressed for time and had to wrap it up for the rigging portion.
Crits!
I'm new around these parts! This will officially be my first post, so I guess I'll jump right into it.
I'm going through school right now, and this is my first character mesh. This was a project assigned to create a sort of half-man, half-animal. Along with that, a distinctive time period. Had to be an African mammal in the Ancient Egyptian time period. 3k for the low, 7k for the high.
Tell me what you think, and crit away. :poly124:
Sculpt shots:
So, yeah. Along with this being my first character, it was my first time using Mudbox and TopoGun. Lots of "firsts" in this thread. All textures were hand painted(in Mudbox, then baked out in TopoGun).
You can see in the sculpts that I had a skirt to go along with him, but I decided to keep it out of the Marmoset renders so you guys could see him better. It does help sell the "Egyptian" motif, but I figured you could just see it in the sculpt shots.
I did have a Kopesh weapon and Shield to go along with it and had base meshes made, sculpted, and textured, but left them out of the retopo process as I was pressed for time and had to wrap it up for the rigging portion.
Crits!
Replies
Other than that, really neat so far!
@neilberard: Oh my god, yes. There was some pretty bad artifacting with the normals. It was way worse than this before.
I baked with Topogun and messed with the cage distance setting and it took care of most of it but it still ended up being pretty bad. I'm certain it had to do with the clothes intersecting with the body but I couldn't really get it to bake perfectly :poly127: Got any advice to shed some light on that? Or should I rethink my retopo and bake process and not intersect objects with the body too much?
First the belt on the chest wouldn't conform to the shape of the chest so severely. If you make the belt and arm/ wristbands separate meshes it will look a lot better and free you up to not have skin tight accessories. Also as a note I would mirror the UV's on the body it looks symmetrical so no need to waste space on unique UVs. Add some more elements like a belt buckle, bags, jewelry, weapons, etc. And eyes please give it some eyes.
Second you need more detail in your spec and to turn up the amount of it. Currently there is no specular info at all so everything looks like its made out of the same material. Also you made you spec all one color it should different colors or white based on the materials. I would recommend looking up some tutorials on making specular maps (can't think of one off of the top of my head, but I will post one if I find something.) Personally I think you have way too much AO in the diffuse. Tone back some of the lighting in you diffuse. Let your normals and the lighting in engine do most of the work there.
Also just notice the topology on the denser mesh it's really wonky. Another reason to break it down into seperate meshes for the low poly is so you can manage you topology more easily.
Hope this helps.
@stevston98: I agree with the sash covering the chest, for sure. It does look a bit out of place because it sort of sticks like glue under his pec cavity.
This was sort of one of those things where I was pretty much told to do it that way in the interest of time and learning the methods for retopologization. It looks pretty wonky, indeed. However, we were told to keep the clothing that lies close to the skin (like the armbands and such) in the reference mesh for TopoGun so we could just trace over it and make it one seamless mesh. The topology on the high-res is asymmetrical because I was following the sash on the chest to create the silhouette over the shoulder and make it pop.
Do you suggest keeping all clothing separate and binding it to the skeleton and skin weight them?
I did paint the spec in Mudbox and I totally agree its too flat and needs more variation. Should have done it in PS, and from the other crits I've gotten that's usually one of the first things I hear, lol. Along with that, the diffuse is very very dark, and I should bump up those levels for sure and sharpen it up.
Eyes were created, I just sort of left them out in this instance.
But, why would I overlap or mirror my UV's? I understand the concept of saving UV space, but that makes it so I can't properly bake occlusion or normals. On top of that, don't modern engines like UDK dislike overlaps and not respond to them well?
Sorry for the long novel of a post, just trying to gather info from you guys
Mirroring UV's allows you to get a lot more texture resolution. For instance with you body had the belt been separate you could have mirrored the entire character and got a ton more detail and cleaner detail out of you bake. Look at the belly button on your character, actually look at any detail it looks blurry and kind of pixelated. This is because low resolution. Now you you could just up res the texture, but for production that's a huge waste of memory and makes load/ render times go up. If you mirrored UVs you would get alot more resolution without up resing. Also normals will bake out just fine. There are ways to fix seam issues caused by mirroring UVs in every engine ( so far as I know). You can also bake an AO map you just can't have AO from things like the belt, but you would be baking each object separately so you would have AO and Normals for each object.
Oh yeah and to bake normals on a mirrored object either move on set of the UV's over by 1 unit so it lines up with the next tile or just don't apply symmetry until the model is baked.