[Riot Art Contest] - Xerath

Kel-Shaded

Update:
Got some free time recently and returned to this guy, So thought I'd update the WIP thread too... even though it looks like my shader work gifs have died



Forgive this slow loading gif:






Hey guys,
Better late than never.
I'm going with Xerath and the Runeborn skin,
I was deciding between environment or VFX, then settled on a champion who's a nice blend of both.

Kel-Shaded

I got started blocking out the literal blocks
& so it begins...

meletis

Good start mate.

Igami

That's a really interesting thought process leading up to picking Xerath.

Looking forward to the results.

slosh

Oh man, really interested to see this come together with fx and what not...

Kel-Shaded

Really looking forward to seeing yours too slosh
I know it's gonna be insane!!!

Kel-Shaded

Sharpened up my block out and started adding my vines,
Also quickly added the skin for his green glow,
though after a while of calling it a skin and the white glow inside it the skeleton,
I've decided to actually make a stylised 'light' skeleton to sit inside the green glow next.

Igami wrote: »

That's a really interesting thought process leading up to picking Xerath.

It sounds pretty lax, but it was a well thought out decision really lol

Golden Yak

Looking forwards to seeing this one finished up - I'm very interested to see how you tackle Xerath's inner body.

Kel-Shaded

Golden Yak wrote: »

I'm very interested to see how you tackle Xerath's inner body.

Ditto

slosh

One thing I would do is to try and shape is form to be more anatomically correct. I know this is tough seeing as how he is basically just rocks and fx but even just giving him a human like stance in his spine would go a long way.

Kel-Shaded

slosh wrote: »

One thing I would do is to try and shape is form to be more anatomically correct. I know this is tough seeing as how he is basically just rocks and fx but even just giving him a human like stance in his spine would go a long way.

You're defo right Slosh, I did restack the stones around the skeleton, which gave it a less rigid feel (thank you), but I'm having a really hard time hitting the 'natural' mark, I'm probably being too delicate with it tbh so the change is probably too subtle.

Kel-Shaded

I had a week of holiday then spent a few days as a forum spectator, but it's about time I got back to work on this.

Added a bit of rock and rune detail to the stones and added a bit more interest to the vines with twists and scores and stuff.

meletis

Coming along nicely dude!

Chantel-sky

I was wondering if someone would do Xerath.. seems like he'd be complicated to do. Yours is looking great though

Golden Yak

Nice idea including his skeleton amongst the debris - that'll definitely give him a freaky appearance.

PhaseVariant

Great stuff man! Love your approach to this design!

Kel-Shaded

Boom Finished, kidding cosplay


Really liking her orange yellow gradients with the blue, wanted to try that out with a bit more saturation.
So,



turned my dynamesh rocks into tools, reduced them to about 500-1k polys each, then divided a few times and reprojected to get my details back on a poly paintable mesh and started my first pass of the texture, cel-shaded left, flat col centre and sketch right, which prolly gives a better estimation of the AO.

Kel-Shaded

It has been a busy few days but finally got my first pass of the texture done,
Flat colour left and right.
The main body ofc is place holder, I just needed colour in there ^^
Shouldn't need to texture the body and skeleton at all actually.

Next stage is to get a low poly, some AO and move fully over to Maya and photoshop...
But first some more disruption... another holiday.
Sorry Xerath, see you in a week.

Kel-Shaded

And back from holidays,

So I did check on an approach to the skeleton and skin in the questions section with:

Kel-Shaded wrote: »

If, for the character art section, I chose an effects heavy champion like Xerath,
Am I allowed to create a shader for his VFX elements like magic and lightning etc,

Assuming this shader is unlit, uses no textures or only the same 2k diffuse as the base character, and can be realtime. Is this an acceptable approach???

A couple weeks back on 'Last edited by Kel-Shaded; 10-31-2014 at 02:41 AM..'

And didn't get a no at least, So this is the way I'm going.
Essentially combining the rules for the Character and VFX categories.

And as I missed the flight, I had a few hours spare in the airport waiting for the next one to try some things out on my laptop,
And as I essentially missed most of my girls birthday in the wrong country, I had more alone time than I had planned for across the week to try shtuff out :poly136:





For the skeleton I wanted to go for an outline shader vibe, The sphere shows best what I had in mind.
The solid white in the centre felt too much like bone so used transparency at the facing angle,

Also went with green as I didn't wanna go for yellow and blue completely, But I used a teal mid tone to mellow out the green, and then used the green more like a rim light.

Also tried something else which is to have a darker green gradient towards the bottom/ off camera angle... but that's causing me problems with transparency...
*Shrugs* WIP





With the skin, I tried to get a hazy feel around the edges to try and break up the form a little. Also tried to make it feel a lil more alien by faking specular, by tuning up the opacity and incandescence at the facing angle.





The splash image makes it look like the magic is moving around inside the character.
I did try to do it with a helix, using vertex alpha to add noise, and then colour sets to undulate the alpha but turned out that doesn't work in viewport 2.0, and the ramp shaders used for the above don't work in standard viewport >.<

So ended up using a layered shader to combine ramps, which is something I only learned recently (TY Danny Williams), And that gives me the bonus of being able to animate the noise easily so I could have something like a gas at one point or something more like particles at another (shown in gif)

The cylinders inside the skin are representing my bones which kinda disappear behind fake spec... which i'm not sure if I like...
May wait til I have the rocks and vines in to see if I need to tone down the incandescence on the skin, and push up the opacity and vibrancy on the bones....

Kel-Shaded

Update:
Got some free time recently and returned to this guy, So thought I'd update the WIP thread too... even though it looks like my shader work gifs have died



Forgive this slow loading gif: