Hi guys! This is Xi Chen. A Chinese girl who is right now studying game art in US. I'm working on Blizzard Student Contest and hoping to get some critic from you guys. I'd like to show my design concepts and any other WIPs. Thank you so much indeed!
This contest means a lot to me. I'm a fan of Blizzard's game art style and this 2015 contest is my first and also last attempt of participating in it because I'm graduating next year. I really wish this could become my trigger of my career path and you guys advice means a lot to me! I'd appreciate any advice or thought. Please feel free to leave any comments. Thank you and thank you again!
And here it goes:
first of all, this is my concept draft. My idea is kind of blur at the beginning. My favorite part of WoW is the mist of pandaria because of it's over all brighter and delight color scheme suits my taste the most. And also because I'm a Chinese, the Chinese elements in the game give me a really close and approachable feeling. I know this part is coming to an end this year but I still decide to base my character in this series because I really love it.
And regarding to the character. I just want do a traveler at the beginning. And later the ideas of merchant or traveling artist came to my mind. I couldn't decided which direction to turn to. I roughly designed the costume and the big shape of the character. I'm not exactly sure if I should make the character into a panda or a raccoon. You may see both characters in this picture. But later I decided to have more approach to the raccoon.
First draft (rough draft)
Second draft (front view)
Replies
Back to some raccoon elements
More merchant elements (those lines are for shoulder pole. I'm not exactly sure what to put there at that poin)
This is the one coolest to the modeling phase. I put a back pack on his shoulder instead of the shoulder pole. I'm a little worried about the 6k tri limit.
The small drum in his hand seems to childish so I changed it into another Chinese traditional instrument, Erhu.
The stuff on the side is traditional Chinese snacks, sticks of sugar-coated haws. But I think it's too overwhelming so I took it out and changed a big brush on the side. Still seems a little more. Can I get some advice from you guys what should I keep?
Without the brush
High res in Zbrush- head
I'm looking forward to any opinions, no matter it's design wise or sculpting wise. Thank you for your time indeed!
The arms & legs look rather short for the head & torso.
It'd probably be better to model without the clothing & props, then add them once you have the basic anatomy finished.
Keep in mind that while red pandas (and racoons, for that matter) have long tails, giant pandas (the traditional black & white critters) do not. This is actually reflected in game; only the red pandarans have visible tails.
I'd pull back a bit.
also, the blue bottle on his belt is getting lost in his blue trousers. Change the colour of the bottle.
Finally you need to paint out the occlusion on the bottom of the sleeves. it needs to be much more subtle.
I did a little paintover to show what it would look like with softer lighting.
It could also be that your lighting setup is too strong. Realtime lighting on top of painted-in lighting can do that. I find you can get pretty WoW-like lighting by using the base texture as emissive map at a medium intensity, and setting any scene lights to about half strength.
Good luck!
Here is the adjustments. Any new thoughts?
Don't do the reverse mistake I made by crunching the value gradient to super dark. You shoud pull back on how bright your upper part is.