Hey guys, I keep following your work here, and it look awesome. Thanks to baldi for stoping by. @daniel morris his hair and face are cool, but the torso and shoulder could use a bit more form, i draw some line on your last render to gave you an idea. I hope you can finish the Hi poly. @Deoce, @fefs. Yours are neat can't wait to see a final render^^
Finished highpoly sculpt, going to do a lowpoly now. Gonna go with the handpainted style as that's something i want to learn so details on the sculpt are not set in stone.
'Cause of my old hardware i couldn't go higher with the polys on my sculpt, guess it's time to buy new one. but i am quite happy for my first try on character.
Comments and critiques are welcomed.
Quite sad that some people decided to stop on this to go for riot challenge, but i'm definitely gonna try joining that one when i finish this.
@kanga I've seen some people still do the last month Challenge, so i guess it's your personal work so there is no real deadline, but the next challenge start the 1st of month.
@MrCreator Good job on finishing the challenge. :thumbup:
For what i can notice it feels like you have some polygoons used on some places that are not needed. Topology of a model is very important in our field of work, it's a must have knowledge.
With your lowpoly topology you have to catch the silhouette of the model and your model in this state could be done with 2000-3000 triangles (if you aim that number) and with around 500 for the staff. So at the end it looks like you spended little less then 10k for your green skull mesh and that's is not useful.
My advice for you is to research a little more about using your polygons most efficiently on your model. There are a lot of lowpoly character wireframes where you can study this.
@Fefs Thank you, yea i decided to do that 'cause i really like the look of pushed ribcage. as it can be seen on the pic.
Anyway, this is just my opinion but i think you should spend little more time on proportions of the shoulder, biceps and chest. Again this is just my opinion. :poly136:
@Xyrtae Thank you
your proportions are looking good, only thing i can say is go little deeper into anatomy of chest and back area.
Hey guys I have been doing the comp this month but getting really stuck any help on my character so far i know i havent done much but any help will be greatly appreciated.
This is my current progress. Had some more free time this week and have re sculpted the face and torso. Still Kinda like the look of the planes but im not sure if i will keep them! Gotta add his back hair, feathers and tail also! Any critique is appreciated! HQ Link
@kanga Great start! Keep it up and you will have an awesome piece come the end!
@devingeesr: Check the proportions of your head against the reference again. Yours seem to have ended up slightly different! Good start tho!
@Baldi Thanks alot for taking the time to draw the head as well as give critiques. Appreciated bro!
Hey guys,
this is where I'm at at the moment.. not sure if I'm going to get this finished on time. still so much to do! spent an hour today trying to get Mayas skin shaders to work.. does anyone know any tutorials for rendering out a turntable with mental ray? also has anyone any experience with Maya hair?
as always crit is very much appreciated
@Kanga please keep working on this he looks great! can i ask how you did the cloth around his hands and feet?
@starfish Absolutely love this style man!(i don't suppose you would be willing to share your workflow?) i would love to see this textured up but thats just me. i wish i had some crit to give you but i can't see much (anything) wrong. you are missing the tail but I'm sure you are aware of that :P. the only other thing i could suggest would be to give the material hanging down over his crotch a bit more love.. in the reference its sort of draped over his second belt.
good to see you joining us.. looks like you both jumped in a bit to quick. you gotta have a good look at reference its the only way you are going to get to know the forms.
when I'm starting out i usually use some of the subtools that come with z brush to give me an idea of proportion, ill still start with z spheres but ill have them in the scene and use them as a guide..
once i have it roughed out i usually block in the main muscle masses at a low sub div. If you jump up sub divisions too quickly you end up with something a bit muddy and lumpy. if you look at kangas image you can see he has it blocked out at a super low poly with most of the main shapes in it already. working like this forces you to keep it simple and look at the bigger shapes and forms.
so
1. get as much reference as you can.. seriously.. assume you have never seen a human body befor get reference for everything. even just spend an hour looking at the Ryan_Kingslien_Anatomy_Model.
2. keep it simple and work your shapes out befor you get to the details
3. build out your muscles using clay build up and smooth don't be afraid to save a version or a layer and go a bit mad.
4. take your time.. you're still learning what a body looks like.. take your fricking time! i know its frustrating but so long as you are checking your ref and working away you will get better. (you won't get better without reference)
5 have fun. always leave your sculpt when you are on an up.. don't work till you are sick of it or you won't want to come back to it later. i find about 2 hours is all i can take before i start making stupid mistakes and need a walk or some food. ( i would also stay away form games and internet.. i find walking gives my head space to think.. i sometimes even come up with solutions to problems im while I'm doing this)
Just a head up, I'm going to start the voting thread for November this Friday. Anyone is welcome to cast their vote and post cool concept art. Also feel free to take more time to finish up October's piece first like many ppl did for the months before.
StephLee Thanks!
Starfish235 Thankyou!
Pearse Thanks!
The bands were done in max. They are just strips of polys I drew over a template of the zbrush mesh, using the polydraw freeform tool. Usually you can just leave them as strips and in zbrush mask them and use extract to get a skin, and then zremesh to get the strips back to a really good lower poly, this time they got messed up though so I used the shell modifier in max then gozeded them into ZB. The transform tool is really good at masking a continuous strip so you can easily sort out the mess with the move tool, although the topo move should do a good job as well.
A bit more: no damage yet, everything is still clean
Its really amazing to see all the different interpretations of the concept, a real eye opener! Great stuff.
Cheers
Wow, every one is progressing fast in this challenge, very good work every body!
I'm almost finishing the retopo first time using topogun, and I think was pretty fast to work there but I wanted an copy/ paste to do the fingers x.x"...later I will show the job done ^^
@Pearse
I think he looks much better with clothes on Wish I could help you with maya but I'm a super noob.
@Kanga
Love the posture. Looks like he is ready to pounce!
@Samuraigun7
When I get stuck like that I usually just dynemesh down to 32 or 64 resolution and start over to block out the big shapes of the body. Try to get inspiration from reference images other than the concepts from Baldi if they are har to read. Keep it up!
Here is where I'm at. Started painting in the basic colors in Zbrush and did retopology on the body (on the right with normal and AO maps). I know the pictures looks kinda strange since I took the zbrush one without perspective and the right one is from Unreal engine's default camera.
I made a new tail for rigging so it looks a little wierd right now.
The low res body is right below 9K tris and I'm shooting for about 16K with the staff and clothes.
I decided to start making something new, after my HDD got problem and I don't have access to my old portfolio projects at this moment ;(
This is my progress after 2 days of work (I believe it will be maybe 8h of work). This is my second try on sculpting full body character, in past I was focused only on faces. I know that my sculpted head look a little bit different (too big) but I like it.
So this is as far as I was able to get this month. Its finished from my experience but I didnt have time to make a low poly model and texture. I really hope I can get some critique to improve. I also uploaded a video of myself modeling, just a timelapse of the sculpt, again any advice/critique would help a lot!
You guys are probably sick of my frequency already but
Corrections on the deltoids, straightened the lower leg a bit so he squats a little less like he is a mutant dwarf, shortened the feet and some surfacing.
Great seeing everyone's work!
Cheers
I'm still working on retopology of character it's consuming a lot of my time and 'cause of some circumstance i didn't have much time on my hands. anyway here's a little teaser update. :poly124: I hope i'll have it finished and ready for baking in next 2 days.
@Veezen Good job, there is nothing wrong with going with your own style and interpretation of the concept.
Would tho scale the feet down a bit feel like they are too big and scale up the hands, maybe making them more bulkier. maybe... just my thoughts. :poly122:
@apollo580 the only thing i could say that you could use more reference about anatomy and proportions if you had more time you would definitely nail those. anyway practice makes perfect. :poly136: Good job :thumbup:
@kanga hell no, keep up posting! It's looking great just one thing for me that needs improvement is the face you could try to spend little more time around that.
Hi everybody, I'm wondering if it would be all right for me to post my final shot? I've been following along with this challenge but I wasn't planing on posting anything, but I like the way that it turned out and am now wanting to share and get feedback. I just don't want to do a ninja submission.
Hi everybody, I'm wondering if it would be all right for me to post my final shot? I've been following along with this challenge but I wasn't planing on posting anything, but I like the way that it turned out and am now wanting to share and get feedback. I just don't want to do a ninja submission.
Okay, here's my final image. Final polycount is just over 19k tris, with two 2k maps, one for the body and one for the staff. There is also a 512x512 map for the cards.
I've been really impressed with all of the work that people have done, and how fast they did it. Keep up all the good work people!
Here is my attempt at this challenge. I tried for a cinematic version of the Soothsayer: custscene stylized hyper-realism (think that's an oxymoron)32k Triangles give or take and 4096 Maps
yeah, I still have a lot to fix on the final render I only have it so far done, I stopped when the month ended, I know I hadn't posted my progress so I didn't want to step on anyone's toes when I posted the final image in November. I am gonna tweak and fix him when I have time come the weekend, like the floor and skin areas.
Most probably my last post in this thread as my character course in school is over and we are moving on to other things next week. I wont say I'm done as I would like to come back to the character and do another texturing pass.
Here is what I've got now and at this moment I will consider it final.
Boy has this been a learning experience. The last four weeks I've been struggling with this character every chance I got. I had just about one month worth of maya experience before starting this challenge as I earlier used zbrush almost exclusively and blender every now and then. Today I feel quite comfortable with maya.
Going form high to low poly. I made the first low poly version in zbrush using retopo with zspere. This version turned out a little too low and I ended up on just about 14K tris. But I didn't like the silhouette so I remade the lowpoly. This time in Maya using quaddraw and ended up with 19095 tris and a much better looking model.
Texturing. I painted everything in zbrush and then baked a base color texture using xnormal. The normal map though I baked in maya as it gave me a better result. I baked all parts by them selves and merged them in photoshop. Then I painted another pass in Substance painter.
Rigging. First time I've touched rigging and man its hard and unforgiving. I made 2 or 3 different rigs until I settled for one. Still not very happy with it but I've learned alot about basic rigging functionality like IK/FK blending.
Animation. In our character course at school we had to animate the character before handing in our assignments. I tried up until the last day of the assignment to make a nice looking walking cycle but failed due to the skirt that I couldn't get to deform correctly. When I couldn't get it to work using FK rig I tried to solve it using nvidias apex cloth plug-in. I think the cloth sim would be the better choice and I might have succeeded If I had more time.
I handed in a very simple and poorly done animation and I dare not show it here
Things learned... Need much more training especially the beyond high poly parts. Animation might just not be my thing.
Lots of new insights in to me new software. I am going to try out different methods of texturing like mari, quixel and substance painter to find what suits me the best.
It's been a great learning experience and its been truly inspirational to see all of the contributors to this challenge. Thanks for sharing your great work.
Best regards
Johan
Neanderland
PS. The image is from UE4 and I can hardly import and set up anything in there. The lighting is shit and doesn't really help make anything look better.
Everything is baked and ready for texturing, here is a base color of the character. It's going very slow, but i'm still motivated to finish this even after so much time passed.
Here are some colour passes from me. Hmm its really top to see everyone still going with this. I put that down to the general tenacity and the marvelous character design
I saw I had to comment on at least one post and being the new guy will give it a go. @neanderland I dont know about UE4 but UDK has the most incredible lighting, with volumes! I think UE4 must be like UDK on steroids from what I have read. I think what you are experiencing is a shader problem which you will probably be able to master with some trouble shooting. All I know is in max when I first used realtime shaders I got a result like yours and it is usually something that doesnt work straight out of the box. Darn.
Amen to the rigging. I remember when I was busy with learning rigging in max. I thought it was a week but it turned out to be 3 months of study! Max has the cat rig which will give you side walk, back walk and procedural walk cycles, dunno what canned animation possibilities there are in Maya as I have only rigged a couple of characters there but rumors are that Maya is the king of character animation so I would be surprised if there was no available system to help you out.
In general I am kind of surprised that many of you guys dont show your lowpoly wireframes, uvs and flat textures as it is a really important area that we all can always use fresh eyes on. Its like the mechanics of game characters.
@kanga. Yeah UE4 is super cool. I'm just so new to it and didn't have much time to really understand what I was doing in there. Had to flip green channels for the normals maps, manually turn off sRGB on the grayscale maps and so on
I would love to sit down and learn UE4 when I have some spare time.
I uploaded my low poly to sketchfab if anyone whants to se my topology.
So i'm starting to lack motivation on this on 'cause lack of experience is catching up to me, again this is my first character and just started with the handpainted stuff. Struggling really hard so i'm thinking of my options... Wrap it up, call it done... forget about it and start doing new sculpts and new characters... or kill my self. :poly124:
I guess failing is not a bad thing, i must admit i learned a lot with this one.
Sorry for reviving this topic, but i just came back to this char and wanted to finish it 'cause it's my first try on a character and didn't want to be in my "graveyard" folder. The textures are sloppy, but i decided to finish it today and that's it. So i can finally put this down to rest, move on and fix all the mistakes on my next project.
5364 Triangles.
1024 textures.
As always comments and critiques are more than welcome.
Replies
might not be able to finish but here is what I got so far,,,
how do i make the images smaller and side by side
@daniel morris his hair and face are cool, but the torso and shoulder could use a bit more form, i draw some line on your last render to gave you an idea. I hope you can finish the Hi poly.
@Deoce, @fefs. Yours are neat can't wait to see a final render^^
keep it up
'Cause of my old hardware i couldn't go higher with the polys on my sculpt, guess it's time to buy new one.
Comments and critiques are welcomed.
Quite sad that some people decided to stop on this to go for riot challenge,
I still have a lot of work to do on this such as the face.
after this I am finally going to start working on the clothing and accessories for a while.
@deoce it looks great, I can't wait to see how it looks when it is finished. and I am glad to see that you are staying to the end.
@Daniel Morris Work more on the abs and the feet are strange, it's looking like he is in heels
@tigerheart Tks! ^^ Now is almost there
@Deoce It's cool! I just think that the the abs muscle this sinking into the belly
@Xyrtae it's getting pretty good
@MrCreator Good job on finishing the challenge. :thumbup:
For what i can notice it feels like you have some polygoons used on some places that are not needed. Topology of a model is very important in our field of work, it's a must have knowledge.
With your lowpoly topology you have to catch the silhouette of the model and your model in this state could be done with 2000-3000 triangles (if you aim that number) and with around 500 for the staff. So at the end it looks like you spended little less then 10k for your green skull mesh and that's is not useful.
My advice for you is to research a little more about using your polygons most efficiently on your model. There are a lot of lowpoly character wireframes where you can study this.
@Torch Thank you.
@Fefs Thank you, yea i decided to do that 'cause i really like the look of pushed ribcage. as it can be seen on the pic.
Anyway, this is just my opinion but i think you should spend little more time on proportions of the shoulder, biceps and chest. Again this is just my opinion. :poly136:
@Xyrtae Thank you
your proportions are looking good, only thing i can say is go little deeper into anatomy of chest and back area.
zsphere start
and with some stuff
Cheers!
@kanga Great start! Keep it up and you will have an awesome piece come the end!
@devingeesr: Check the proportions of your head against the reference again. Yours seem to have ended up slightly different! Good start tho!
@Baldi Thanks alot for taking the time to draw the head as well as give critiques. Appreciated bro!
this is where I'm at at the moment.. not sure if I'm going to get this finished on time. still so much to do! spent an hour today trying to get Mayas skin shaders to work.. does anyone know any tutorials for rendering out a turntable with mental ray? also has anyone any experience with Maya hair?
as always crit is very much appreciated
@Kanga please keep working on this he looks great! can i ask how you did the cloth around his hands and feet?
@starfish Absolutely love this style man!(i don't suppose you would be willing to share your workflow?) i would love to see this textured up but thats just me. i wish i had some crit to give you but i can't see much (anything) wrong. you are missing the tail but I'm sure you are aware of that :P. the only other thing i could suggest would be to give the material hanging down over his crotch a bit more love.. in the reference its sort of draped over his second belt.
@devingeesr and Samuraigun7 Hey guys,
good to see you joining us.. looks like you both jumped in a bit to quick. you gotta have a good look at reference its the only way you are going to get to know the forms.
when I'm starting out i usually use some of the subtools that come with z brush to give me an idea of proportion, ill still start with z spheres but ill have them in the scene and use them as a guide..
once i have it roughed out i usually block in the main muscle masses at a low sub div. If you jump up sub divisions too quickly you end up with something a bit muddy and lumpy. if you look at kangas image you can see he has it blocked out at a super low poly with most of the main shapes in it already. working like this forces you to keep it simple and look at the bigger shapes and forms.
so
1. get as much reference as you can.. seriously.. assume you have never seen a human body befor get reference for everything. even just spend an hour looking at the Ryan_Kingslien_Anatomy_Model.
2. keep it simple and work your shapes out befor you get to the details
3. build out your muscles using clay build up and smooth don't be afraid to save a version or a layer and go a bit mad.
4. take your time.. you're still learning what a body looks like.. take your fricking time! i know its frustrating but so long as you are checking your ref and working away you will get better. (you won't get better without reference)
5 have fun. always leave your sculpt when you are on an up.. don't work till you are sick of it or you won't want to come back to it later. i find about 2 hours is all i can take before i start making stupid mistakes and need a walk or some food. ( i would also stay away form games and internet.. i find walking gives my head space to think.. i sometimes even come up with solutions to problems im while I'm doing this)
hope that helps.. Keep on trucking guys
p.s. Im super serious about the reference..
Starfish235 Thankyou!
Pearse Thanks!
The bands were done in max. They are just strips of polys I drew over a template of the zbrush mesh, using the polydraw freeform tool. Usually you can just leave them as strips and in zbrush mask them and use extract to get a skin, and then zremesh to get the strips back to a really good lower poly, this time they got messed up though so I used the shell modifier in max then gozeded them into ZB. The transform tool is really good at masking a continuous strip so you can easily sort out the mess with the move tool, although the topo move should do a good job as well.
A bit more: no damage yet, everything is still clean
Its really amazing to see all the different interpretations of the concept, a real eye opener! Great stuff.
Cheers
I'm almost finishing the retopo first time using topogun, and I think was pretty fast to work there but I wanted an copy/ paste to do the fingers x.x"...later I will show the job done ^^
@monkeydonuts246
Yours is coming along nicely. I don't know why but to me he looks small, but powerful. Me likes
@Starfish235
Nice hard lines. Looks super clean.
@Pearse
I think he looks much better with clothes on
@Kanga
Love the posture. Looks like he is ready to pounce!
@Samuraigun7
When I get stuck like that I usually just dynemesh down to 32 or 64 resolution and start over to block out the big shapes of the body. Try to get inspiration from reference images other than the concepts from Baldi if they are har to read. Keep it up!
Here is where I'm at. Started painting in the basic colors in Zbrush and did retopology on the body (on the right with normal and AO maps). I know the pictures looks kinda strange since I took the zbrush one without perspective and the right one is from Unreal engine's default camera.
I made a new tail for rigging so it looks a little wierd right now.
The low res body is right below 9K tris and I'm shooting for about 16K with the staff and clothes.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=2168583
This is my progress after 2 days of work (I believe it will be maybe 8h of work). This is my second try on sculpting full body character, in past I was focused only on faces. I know that my sculpted head look a little bit different (too big) but I like it.
More stuff:
Cheers
Link to the youtube video:
http://youtu.be/WNendgFC_54
Corrections on the deltoids, straightened the lower leg a bit so he squats a little less like he is a mutant dwarf, shortened the feet and some surfacing.
Great seeing everyone's work!
Cheers
@Veezen Good job, there is nothing wrong with going with your own style and interpretation of the concept.
Would tho scale the feet down a bit feel like they are too big and scale up the hands, maybe making them more bulkier. maybe... just my thoughts. :poly122:
@apollo580 the only thing i could say that you could use more reference about anatomy and proportions if you had more time you would definitely nail those. anyway practice makes perfect. :poly136: Good job :thumbup:
@kanga hell no, keep up posting! It's looking great just one thing for me that needs improvement is the face you could try to spend little more time around that.
sure man, anytime
I've been really impressed with all of the work that people have done, and how fast they did it. Keep up all the good work people!
Now to go Bloo!
Cheers
the only thing that disturbs me is the very high spec on the skin
and that your puddle of water seems to be an entire mass of triangles
yeah, I still have a lot to fix on the final render I only have it so far done, I stopped when the month ended, I know I hadn't posted my progress so I didn't want to step on anyone's toes when I posted the final image in November. I am gonna tweak and fix him when I have time come the weekend, like the floor and skin areas.
The staff:
Cheers
Here is what I've got now and at this moment I will consider it final.
Boy has this been a learning experience. The last four weeks I've been struggling with this character every chance I got. I had just about one month worth of maya experience before starting this challenge as I earlier used zbrush almost exclusively and blender every now and then. Today I feel quite comfortable with maya.
Going form high to low poly. I made the first low poly version in zbrush using retopo with zspere. This version turned out a little too low and I ended up on just about 14K tris. But I didn't like the silhouette so I remade the lowpoly. This time in Maya using quaddraw and ended up with 19095 tris and a much better looking model.
Texturing. I painted everything in zbrush and then baked a base color texture using xnormal. The normal map though I baked in maya as it gave me a better result. I baked all parts by them selves and merged them in photoshop. Then I painted another pass in Substance painter.
Rigging. First time I've touched rigging and man its hard and unforgiving. I made 2 or 3 different rigs until I settled for one. Still not very happy with it but I've learned alot about basic rigging functionality like IK/FK blending.
Animation. In our character course at school we had to animate the character before handing in our assignments. I tried up until the last day of the assignment to make a nice looking walking cycle but failed due to the skirt that I couldn't get to deform correctly. When I couldn't get it to work using FK rig I tried to solve it using nvidias apex cloth plug-in. I think the cloth sim would be the better choice and I might have succeeded If I had more time.
I handed in a very simple and poorly done animation and I dare not show it here
Things learned... Need much more training especially the beyond high poly parts. Animation might just not be my thing.
Lots of new insights in to me new software. I am going to try out different methods of texturing like mari, quixel and substance painter to find what suits me the best.
It's been a great learning experience and its been truly inspirational to see all of the contributors to this challenge. Thanks for sharing your great work.
Best regards
Johan
Neanderland
PS. The image is from UE4 and I can hardly import and set up anything in there. The lighting is shit and doesn't really help make anything look better.
I saw I had to comment on at least one post and being the new guy will give it a go.
@neanderland I dont know about UE4 but UDK has the most incredible lighting, with volumes! I think UE4 must be like UDK on steroids from what I have read. I think what you are experiencing is a shader problem which you will probably be able to master with some trouble shooting. All I know is in max when I first used realtime shaders I got a result like yours and it is usually something that doesnt work straight out of the box. Darn.
Amen to the rigging. I remember when I was busy with learning rigging in max. I thought it was a week but it turned out to be 3 months of study! Max has the cat rig which will give you side walk, back walk and procedural walk cycles, dunno what canned animation possibilities there are in Maya as I have only rigged a couple of characters there but rumors are that Maya is the king of character animation so I would be surprised if there was no available system to help you out.
In general I am kind of surprised that many of you guys dont show your lowpoly wireframes, uvs and flat textures as it is a really important area that we all can always use fresh eyes on. Its like the mechanics of game characters.
Cheers and looking great everyone!
I would love to sit down and learn UE4 when I have some spare time.
I uploaded my low poly to sketchfab if anyone whants to se my topology.
[sketchfab]1bb26b7d3b2d4bf8aa20d4671b030009[/sketchfab]
Soothsayer by neanderland on Sketchfab
I guess failing is not a bad thing, i must admit i learned a lot with this one.
Anyway here is a pic and the wireframe too.
5364 Triangles.
1024 textures.
As always comments and critiques are more than welcome.
started laying down some solid colors.
way better res here i guess:
http://postimg.org/image/z7pkfbgd9/full/