Student Looking for Feedback on Character

Xane

Hi there. I'm a student in my final year at Edinburgh Napier University here in Scotland. I'm after some feedback on my character for my dissertation and I was wondering if the Polycount community can help me out here? I have been working on this redesign of the character from the game Quake. The general artistic design I have been going for was to fuse together elements from the original as well as more recent pieces of fan art.

Also I need you to confirm that you don't mind me using your feedback in my report via this survey. You have to enter your e-mail address and username in the text box. Don't worry I have no intention spam you, it's simply a formality.

Any way here's the screens, I'll include a board of inspiration (not my work) to show my inspiration. Thanks in advance for your highly valuable input.

Link for survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7H7C8GY

Xane

..and some more screens

Xane

and some more...

DWalker

The head seems too small for the body, and the shoulders look to be quite high relative to the arms. In general, armor can make the proportions seem odd, so it's usually best to get feed back on the basic shape before adding thick armor.

butt_sahib

Hey Xane

Looks pretty sick overall.

My crits:-
1- The chest piece/shoulder pads could use some more extreme deformations like extrudes/bevels/general hills and valleys idea. At the moment it looks like youve got a base of simplistic armour and youve slapped on some stencils on it. I suggest go and really bring some pieces out and push some pieces in alot more. The boots show a great level of variation, the chest piece/shoulder pads not so much, especially the back
2- That upper lip is huge! and the angle of the mouth area looks odd
3- The cloth folds look pretty nice but you have them all over his pants. You should add in some rest areas (like the groin) and areas where they are really condensed (like where it meets the boots) and areas inbetween with larger folds. They look really good but i believe you can push them alot further.
4- Honestly, i believe you can push the design abit futher. At the moment it seems like you collected reference and had a general idea of what you wanted and then quickl dove into the sculpt without really experimenting with ideas/making concept design sculpts or images and exploring how you could go about the character.

Xane

Thanks a tonne guys, this feedback is really informative. You've managed to access some of my actions pretty accurately which is interesting.

Also I'm not sure which one of you signed the consent survey as the e-mail I received doesn't correspond with either of you. If you don't mind me using your feedback in my report would you be able to put your username alongside your e-mail in the survey box just so that I can identify you. Thanks again. Sorry for the pestering.

PaulP

Hey man nice work with this character. There are definitely some crits and issues to be addressed with future projects, so I'll try and describe the most significant ones below.

The first issue, and most possibly the most important, is to have a clear design goal. I read that this was a re-design inspired by other fan art and that's cool, but I think it would help if you had a more defined end goal so you aren't watering down your design with fan art that has it's own inspiration (mixing too many different design ideas can hurt the end product). For that reason it would be good to peak some specific themes and styles you want to follow. For example he could be re-designed to fit in a realistic high-end game with Ancient Egyptian inspired sci-fi armour and technology.

On a related note, I don't know if that image board you posted is your only ref, but it is useful to have loads of image as reference when developing a character, especially if you want to re-design them. The character I'm currently making has around 60 images, including 4 image boards focusing on different parts of the character. I've sourced images on the characters facial expressions, armour shapes and details, silhouette, materials (such as leather), and other shots which have helped me slightly re-design and personalize the character so it's not just a copy.

Like DWalker said, it's important to have a solid body base to start on before dressing your character. You may have already gone through this with other people giving crit, but if not it should be done in the future. If you mess up the body and then dress your character, you're going to have a much harder time fixing the proportions afterwards. Every character I make I try to start with a solid base which doesn't contain any high frequency detail. This allows me to build the proportions and body type of the character and fit the armour and clothing around it in a realistic fashion.

I'd like to expand upon butt_sahib's crit about the armour extrusions. This type of character, imo, would suit a more bulky design with details being extruded out of the armour like in Gears of War. The current details look very tame and give the chunky armour pieces more of a flat and less interesting look. The details themselves are very cool, but they just don't stand out and make an impression atm. It is also important to consider how the hard surface elements edges are defined. To capture the most detail during baking, it is important to avoid sharp angles (like 90degree right angles) because these won't bake correctly and will end up looking flat. Make use of bevels to improve your bake quality and get more realistic and interesting hard surface shapes. Look at some mechanically produced equipment like gun parts to get a better impression.

I won't give you any crit on the anatomy and cloth folds because these are areas that can always use improvement. Just keep practicing these areas and doing sculpting studies in ZBrush to improve these skills. A couple of books worth investing in to help you with this are:

Human Anatomy for Artists by Eliot Golfinger
Dynamic Wrinkles and Drapery by Burne Hogarth

Keep up the good work and good luck with your project!

Xane

Great thanks Paul for taking the time to write that. I did look at other reference some of the time, but I can absolutely see the benefit of making far more in depth boards. I did try to do some baking, but I ran into a lot of trouble with as you said the hard edges. I'll have to look into how I can approach these areas better in future, maybe test things through on a smaller project such as a weapon or such.