[Riot Art Contest] - Arcade Syndra
I know that matching LoL's art style is a challenge itself, but in my opinion there is no creativity at all doing an existing skin so I'm going to do a new skin mixing my favourite champ, Syndra, and my favourite skins, the arcade ones.
Here is a quick sketch with some ideas that I'll probably end up changing while modeling...
Here is a quick sketch with some ideas that I'll probably end up changing while modeling...
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Just a thought. Can't wait to see more!
I'm going to substitute the star to put some pixelated stuff like your image. Thank you for the idea, I'll post this tweak and the new hair soon.
Last but not least, thank you all for the comments, they help to keep me motivated!
As you can see I've changed some things over the original design, not too many though. The cloth stripes on the shoulders were to noisy so I've decided to change it for arm bracelets with a pixel art heart on them. I've thought that I can make the pixel art pieces (space invader, heart and pacman) glow in the final model, I'll see if it looks good or not.
And I finally realized that the Syndra balls are too iconic to change them for something else, so I'm going to maintain the spherical form but pixelating it so it matches the style of the skin. I'm going to make them colorful too, may be with a gradation of color line per line from bottom to top. If even doing this the pixels are not noticeable at a distance I'll try to make the ball with less and bigger pixels, till you can see from far that it's a sphere made with cubes.
As I said this is just a polypaint color pass with its own limitations, so it has no baked ambient oclusion, levels, color correction or any photoshop magic at all. It's more of a base color study to see what works and what doesn't. I wish ZBrush had a hue, saturation adjustment for the polypaint but it hasn't so I'll have to play around with that once I've done the UVs and texture.
Everything in this render is polypaint and self illuminated. It only has a very very light casted shadow over it but this is pretty much how you see it with no lighting. I also did a greyscale test to see if the values are ok, I might change some things in the final texture but I see it right by now.
By now, I think it kinda matches LoL's art style and I still have to push those textures with photoshop and do some visibility tests over Summoner's rift to make it match perfectly. Also posing the model is gona give it a nice touch.
I like the initial concept, but kinda feel the body is not reflecting the initial draw properly, not sure if is final sculpt but seems to me is missing detail on clothes and a body silhouette pass. Must admit this concept is one of my favorites, would be great if the final 3D chap is awesome as the initial idea
if you ask my opinion I'd say that I'm unsure as to how much i like the vest and straps crossing her chest. I say that because there's a lot visually going on with the helmet, but not so much with the vest, and the square form it creates sort of harshly connects with the head/headpiece, especially with the parallel shapes in the horizontal visor and the horizontal vest trim; makes everything in-between feel very blocky....which now that i think about it, is pretty characteristic of retro gaming hahaha, but personally i just don't like that geometric look all that much, but again that's just my opinion. Quality wise still is rockin! ^_^
Also, the posing really affects at giving a natural feel to the character. When posing, I'll do things like push her chest and head back, rise up the bust, cross her legs and tilt her shoulders and hips, and I hope that's going to give her more similarity to the initial concept.
So I think the main problem is pretty much in the clothing right now. I tried to keep it simple to match LoL's art style but it's true that I can give a bit more detail to it, but not too much more. I can see a few things that I can change to make her look better and closer to the original concept. I can see that I should open the skirt a bit more, to create a stronger silhouette. And I think I should make the back part of the headdress bigger, to make it visible from the front. I also want to say that the cloth stripes over the skirt are a place holder, the final ones are going to be more similar to the concept but Im not going to put straight planes in this renders, which is what I'm going to use to make that part, so I made that quick stripes in zbrush.
Here is a silhouette study of where I think I should go to.
I want to add something on those shoulders like in the picture but I'm still not sure. When I tried to put the original concept cloth veils they looked too noisy but they might work now that the model is more finished. I'm going to make some tests with those shoulders and see what I can do. I still have to tweak some volumes though.
The ball looks very nice also, love the pixels ! But I wonder if they'll read well in game distance, maybe they need to be bigger.
Keep up !
Abrvpt- You are not wrong at all, but in this case this thin legs are quite caracteristic of Syndra from what I've seen in the ingame models. She is floating so she doesn't need a noticable base on the ground so this decreasing volume from top to bottom looks ok. Nonetheless, I think I should make that feet a little bit bigger, yes. And about the ball, I'll try to make pixels noticeable by working with the texture, but if it does not work I'll have to make thos pixels bigger, yes.
mrnunez- Thank for the help, if I win something I'll have to give you half of the prize haha. I'll stick with the 2nd option too. And I'll choose the final saturation once I have the model over the game map, to make it fit perfectly, so all this stuff is provisional at this stage.
I'm going to tweak some minor volumes and go for that retopology. Thanks everybody for helping again.
I'm uploading the images to google+ to post them here because I don't know how to upload them from my pc, but the point is, I don't know why but the quality is horrible, I'm sorry for that :P
Looks amazing Hekutor! The pixel sphere came out great! Care to share how you modeled that?