A Boy and his Monsters {Character WIP}

MrHobo

Update:
11/09


I started this pre-comiccon challenge and then put it down, now that the challenge is over Im picking it back up.

I saw this illustration by Don Kenn a while back and I thought it would be fun to do something based off this and then take it a bit further...
To be clear, this is just inspiration Im not trying to recreate this exactly.


I started with the monsters but I will be redoing a lot of my texture work to push things farther. There will be different variants with hue shifts and proportional differences, same mesh, textures and rig, just tweaks.




I also made a "carved version" and some gibs to use as a background element


And here's the boy, I took the weekend and refined the face/head and the clothing a bit more and did a proportion tweak or two.





I have a few more things to tidy up before lowpoly on the kid (also gotta due some furniture and silverware) but I figured it would be wise to post up my progress so far and get fresh eyes on everything before I get tunnel vision.

MrHobo

Made some adjustments to the face, tweaked his brow a bit, gave him slightly smaller eye sockets and made his face less long. I think Im about ready to start retopology. Im probably going to do a quick bake test first though...

MrHobo

Been a while here's an update. Low is about 20k polys and
bakes (AO, Normals, Cavity) are done too, rollin with 2 2k maps. All the skin is on one map and everything else is on the other. Eyes and hair have their own maps.



And here's some texturing progress, been focusing on skin and eyes so far. Everything else is just base color flats/polypaint.



I'll be baking eyebrows and eyelashes tomorrow.

Twotents

level of creepy intensifies.

Joost

Creepy, but awesome! I think the creature could have thinner wrists though. The arms need more taper IMO.

MrHobo

@Twotents- The creepier the better right?
@komakc- Thanks that's a good point, when I swing back to the monster I'll add a bit more taper to the wrists and hands.

Greg DAlessandro

what is the story behind the marks on his head?

MrHobo

When Im done it will be scar tissue. From the creatures gnawing on his scalp now and then

Here a hair update:

MrHobo

Fixed up the skin and did some lighting tests.
So far so good I think.

Dimfist

This is really twisted love it.

MrHobo

Thanks man!

Here's another update. The clean pass on the skin and what not is done. I'll finalize the materials on the clothes and then do a filth/dirt pass on everything else.




Albedo, Gloss, Hair Alpha

MrHobo

Made a bunch of adjustments. Hair and eyes were tweaked. Started dirtying his clothes and made some skin adjustments to his monster.

Dubzski

Wowa dude creepy as fk, but great to see something original in terms of genre... not just another wizard/ sci-fi trooper etc.

Joopson

I'm loving it, except for one thing. I'm really not liking the kids hair. It doesn't flow believably, it all seems to be sticking straight out. It's detracting a lot from an otherwise super cool character and soon-to-be scene.

ArtUnitFive

and here I am, fresh out of the shower, eating my breakfast and already terrified, nice work dude.

Caldria

Haha, charles man - that thing is suitably disgusting!

as for the kid's hair, I can see you're trying to go for that short buzzcut kinda thing right? using all those alpha shells to achieve that. I really think getting a good texture on his head for the hair will help support the alpha shells (I'm not sure they alone can do it)

great work man, looking forward to seeing more!

butt_sahib

Hey man

Everything looks scrumptious but i have to agree, the hair looks odd and kinda bringing the kids quality down for me honestly. Hope it works out in the end

Rolang

Hi Charles! Maybe try combining multiple hair shells, that have different directions baked to them. So for example, if you have hair that is pointing to the left, add another layer of hair that points to the right, on that area. That way you might be able to make it look good in different camera angles. And sorry if this is totally stupid idea, I don't have any experience creating shell hair, but I think they did something like that in Shadow of the colossus.

Di$array

Hey buddy, cheers for this. There goes a decent night of sleep.

The Monster/creature is outstanding. Maybe you could add some variety to the scene with different shaped head. Just a thought.

As for the kid, by having a shorter buzz cut with patches of different length here and there may solve some problems. Try angling the hair in a slight direction to.

Other than that keep working away at it.

CactusFantastico

Main crit on the monsters is that in the concept their head is much rounder and they also have less of a neck. Looking forward to seeing this progress though!

MrHobo

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Super appreciated. I tried to take all of your ideas and comments into account over the past week or so in regards to the hair. I scaled the UV's to get more of an actual flow to the hair. Then I tightened the UV's and the shell geo in the areas where the hair is supposed to be thinner to tone down the volume. This is about the 5th or 6th iteration. To be clear these are still the same shells and textures, just tweaked Uvs and geo.
In regards to the monsters there will be color and proportional differences in the variants, when I get back to work on them.

Better? Worse? Go home you're drunk?

MrHobo

Here's todays progress on everything else.
Added dirt/smudges to his face hands and legs. Worked more on the dirt and stains on the shirt and pants. I need to do a ton more but progress is progress.

Popolo

I'm really loving this, get both parts edward gorey/binding of isaac.
There's two thing that I feel could be improved:
The hair is looking really unnatural, theres no natural flow in there like [IMG]http://chairliftchatter.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/DSCN1221.jpg[/IMG The nails are looking "dirty", are you overlaying your AO on your diffuse? Besides that, soild work [/img]

MrHobo

Nope no AO in the diffuse, Im sticking to a PBR work flow. The nails looking dirty was intentional. Does it look like overkill?
As for the hair, I going to lay out alpha cards this week to get something more believable and put aside the alpha shells for now.
Me being me I'll probably try and find another alpha shell based solution in a few months
Thanks for the feedback!

Bek

MrHobo wrote: »

The nails looking dirty was intentional. Does it look like overkill?

Does seem a bit strong; possibly because the dirt seems uniform around the whole nail. It ideally would be dirtiest under the nail with less dirt around the quick.

Popolo

I think it's what Bek said and also the dirt in contrast with the rest of the hand, for instance:

here & here

Good luck with everything, cant wait too see this finished Will you create a scene like your ref image?

newto3d

Every bit of this freaks me the F*k out..... Good job

MrHobo

Good point Bek.
Popolo thanks for the ref and yes the plan is definitely to make a little scene for everything.
Thanks newto3d

Still plugging away at this Ive moved on to alpha planes. This is still super WIP (he's partially bald so i guess that is obvious) but I thought I would show where I am at with the new hair. When i have full coverage I will dial everything back and start adding thinner patches to show the scars. Right now there is no normals, spec, gloss, etc. just the raw alpha. Sooooooooooo much more to do.

MrHobo

Moving extra sloooooooooowly.



Edit: forgot to post the more cohesive shot:

MrHobo

uuuuupate!!!!
Almost done with the hair still have a bunch of small tweaks to make. and need to get it lookin ace from all sides. I will probably be swapping some UVs around to thin the hair out a bit more in certain places as well.
I also made some adjustments to the skin gloss.

oxblood

aghh this guys making me ich.. your definitely doing something right

MrHobo

Thanks Im happy its giving you all the ick!
Did some work on the hair silhouette and played with filters...
Dont worry just playin.



And for shits and giggles I turned off the eye stuff:

almighty_gir

one thing you could try is making sure the hair planes normals match the normals of the head mesh, it makes quite a bit of a difference:



this plugin for max can help with it:

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/normal-thief

MrHobo

Thanks Gir! I did some googling and found out the same functionality is in Maya through Transfer Attributes. I'll give it a shot when i get back from work tonight.

BradMyers82

nice work here. Looking forward to seeing how that hair turns out. Its looking sooo much better then when you started working on it.

MrHobo

Spent today getting back to work on my boy and monsters project.
I think the monsters are pretty much done at this point and the boy is almost done. Just a few more hair tweaks and fix his tie, then I can finally build the diorama scene for them. I'll be happy to finally wrap this up and move on.

Things I done did:
I dropped all my spec maps just gloss and letting the shader do its work.
Adjusted subsurface maps
Adjusted hair and hair settings
Lots itty bitty tweaks.

and now Images:

Joopson

It all looks absolutely fantastic, except for the hair; hair is super hard to get looking good. Have you looked much at how other people's texture maps for hair look?

Right now yours looks pretty monotone; sort of a flat tone of grey, and it looks very very thin and soft, in a way I've never seen human hair look. Human hair is actually pretty coarse and varried. I'd suggest maybe giving him parted hair, which will be easier to get looking good with conventional techniques than the current hairstyle.

The hair you have now is loads better than the hair you used to have, but it still isn't there compared with the rest of the work on this piece.

MrHobo

Good point Joopson. The hairs been a real struggle. I think the card placement itself is probably fine and it may be I need to repaint new alphas and textures. I'll take a look at some PBR hair flats (if anybody has any examples they know of let me know) and give it a few more passes before I decide to try a new hair style. Thanks again!

MrHobo

Tonight's update:
Its a small update but I pushed the gloss a bit more on the eye lids area and lips. Also thinking about dropping the hair all together and just texturing a buzzcut for him.. Im going to give it one more hard try before I do that though. Probably start the new hair attempt from scratch tomorrow.

MrHobo

New hair again. Tossed out all the old cards and textures and fixed his tie. Also trying out some gold embroidery stuff which i will most likely drop.
Also thank Gir, i got the normal trick to work

Uberren

Liking the new look a lot
Keep it up.

MrHobo

Thanks!

Made a book an evil looking book of magic yesterday for the kid. This is just the sculpt so far with some poly paint in Toolbag2, no lowpoly yet.

MrHobo

Finished the sculpting and tweaking and baked everything down. AO Cavity and Normals in Toolbag.
I'll do the texturing tomorrow and give DDO another whirl as well as open the book up and get some interior pages going on in there.

MrHobo

Current book progress:
Still need to do a lot of little things, its always a lot of little things hahaha

MrHobo

Update from last night:
Pushed a lot of things but still need some tweaks and to add the tattoos (text on the back and decoratively), also closed the kids mouth. He's not rigged this was just to see what he looked like with a closed mouth.

fearian

Wow this has come on leaps and bounds dude! I quite liked the idea of the gold stitching, and it matching the book. maybe a monogram on the collar?

Also that book is sick! no really, super gross

MrHobo

Great suggestion! I think the monogram look will work weel, i'll give it a sot tonight.

Torch

Damn, this is mental!

MrHobo

Thanks Torch! Im headin in the right direction then
Added the tattoos and adjusted the tarnish on the gold tonight.I may have overworked the scratches but they've grown on me, so they might be here to stay.
Im also thinking about bringing the monsters the kid and the book together in one scene to start checking how they all look together. Probably try it this weekend.

MrHobo

Interior pages from last night and tonights progress. I'll need to add a some normal information for it, wrinkled paper maybe:

MrHobo

Tonight progress:
Adjusted the gloss (again), albedo, and all the eye textures.
A few more stray stands of hair and a sanity check on the gloss work then I think he's done. Oh and the monogram gold stitching too.
I'll start blocking out the scene next week... Note to self look up 19th century operating theaters.