Low Poly Critter

JabacOrdof

Hey everyone! Another semester starts and thus another exciting assignment! Low Poly Animals. Fun stuff! Challenging myself a little more than usual this time around by auditing this Character Development class, which means I will be more on my own than previous classes, but I'm sure with the help of all of your wonderful feedback I shall succeed. Guidelines for this project: 500 Tris, 258x258 textures, and only diffuse maps with ambient occlusions allowed. Decided I am going to do a Dog, something along the lines of a Shepard so I can get some good muscle definition in the diffuse detail as well as having some nice fur texture. I got myself familiarized with the canine anatomy thanks to an amazing anatomy atlas book, and banged out some studies to get familiarized with the forms. Tomorrow I will start with the model and will update after I make good progress. Please do offer any feedback/comments and stay tuned! Thanks all!


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JabacOrdof

Alright I have gotten the mesh together coming in at 496 tris. I am going to spend some more time making sure it is as organic as possible before moving on to the texturing. If you see anything jump out at you or you see something that looks odd, please do let me know! Thanks everyone.

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JabacOrdof

Finished UV unwrapping and tweaking the layout. Not much visible stretching especially in the areas that will have the most detail. I think I have optimized the UVs efficiently, and will begin texturing soon. If anyone has any comments or suggestions as to how i may improve the UV layout I'd love to hear it!

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MadcoreTom

Its looking really good. The silhouette looks perfect to me.

Are you going for a particular style with the smoothing groups? It looks a little odd on the front legs, making them look square.
In relation to the UVs, you could save space by mirroring parts, at least the underside of the dog

JabacOrdof

Hey thanks for the feedback! I'll got back to the UVs and mirror the underbelly and see how that works, good point. I'm not trying for any specific style I was just trying to get the silhouette down while staying within the 500 tri limit. I agree it does look square, do you think the textures will be able to compensate for it or do I need to go back and try to round it out?

Heather.Hughes

You might want to look at your UVs a bit more as well. There seems to be some stretching/warping on the legs.

Additionally, it looks like the UVs aren't scaled evenly (the head looks to be getting more space - note how the checkers are smaller vs the body). That can be fine depending how big the difference is, but it has the potential to throw off your texture as well (if parts look higher res than others).

Spacey

Model looks good, but I have some notes on your unwrap:

It's helpful to make the UVs straight where it's straight on the model (legs in particular). You'll find it's a lot harder to paint when your pixels aren't running straight, but have a twisting motion going down the leg. So all those UV islands that are slightly tilted? They're going to be frustrating to work on and in the end the texture is going to look off.

On a related note, when unwrapping legs, arms, and other similar things, I like to keep the unwrap as square as possible. Even if you have areas where the model tappers in (like near the bottom of your dog's leg) I keep that straight. The pixel density is going to be tighter in that area, but it's a fine trade-off for saving me the headache of dealing with pixels running into the seam at an angle. And again, it makes it that much easier to paint. This is even more important when using such a small texture.

It looks like your UVs aren't mirrored properly? If you have an edge running down the middle of your model (which it looks like you do) you can delete half of the model, unwrap it (keep the middle edge as straight as you can), and mirror it over. Then when you're in the UV editor, just grab one of the halves, flip, and weld.

You're working with a really small texture, so I would consider just unwrapping half of the model and leaving it at that. That will give you more pixels to play with the texture. If you do it right it should reduce wasted space on the unwrap. That's assuming both sides of the dog are going to have the same texture and you're not going for any asymmetry.

JabacOrdof

Thanks everyone for the great feedback so far! I'm going to go back and straighten out the UV Islands and make sure that they are all scaled a bit more evenly, though I would like to get some more detail on the head and torso than the rest of the mesh so I may leave it a bit bigger and see where it goes. The legs were really giving me a hassle so that advice really helps! Ill manipulate the UVs to make the legs squared out. I will try to mirror as much as I can but I think I may leave some of it for asymmetry. You have all been a huge help! I'll post the next update with the revised UVs soon.

killnpc

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this is an interesting effect. made me think this is how some master sculpture would block out shapes when first starting. the top of the back hip bone in particular was against my impulse, yet was curious to see the outcome if it were sculpted to complete.

JabacOrdof

I'm glad the mesh sparked some curiosity! I really tried to get the basic shapes of the anatomical figure down. Do you think the back hip bone rises too high, or does it work fine for the mesh as it is?

JabacOrdof

Alright, I went back and redid the UV unwrapping using the great advice from you all. It came out much better than the first pass! I made sure to try and square off the legs this time around and they are looking much better. There is slight stretching in the underbelly where the legs start to extend, but those areas are not extremely noticeable and I have minimized the warping as much as I could. I am happy overall with the UVs, but there are two concerns I have. Because the UVs are mirrored I obviously have a seam running down the center of my mesh. I believe if I am careful the seam will not pose a problem when I texture, but it is still something to watch out for. Another thing is the open space in the UV Editor. I have scaled the UVs up as much as possible, and I have a good amount of room to texture, but IO hesitate to leave such a large amount of open space. Though, I do not have anything to fill the space with, and I am not sure if it is worth any unnecessary redone unwrapping to get some parts of the UVs into a state where they are not mirrored. Will probably move on to texturing unless anyone has any problems with the new UV layout. Thanks everyone, as always!

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JabacOrdof

Baked the AO and its looking pretty good. I'm all set to dig into the texturing now. Updates on that soon.

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JabacOrdof

First pass at textures. Will probably look to add more color variation and stronger highlights/shadows on the second pass tomorrow, but I am going to stop now and wait to get some fresh eyes on it. Let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions I'd love to hear them!

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JabacOrdof

Alright that about wraps it up for this project. Made a base for the rendering process, though I haven't really rendered very often for my previous projects so I am less familiar with the do's and don't's of rendering. Added more detail to the texture and have compiled the final results here for you all to look at and comment on. I'd love to hear how I can better improve my workflow or any aspects of my work, so feel free to comment on whatever you would like! Thanks for following me through this first project and I'll be back when the second project is assigned.

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Francois_K

If I were you I'd revisit this in your spare time.

You gotta make beter usage of that UV space. You have way too much unused space , cut up the UV's and try to fit them all in there. Also there's this one bit at the hind paw which looks really odd.
For rendering you could potentially get Marmoset Toolbag

Quick thing what I mean because I can't explain for shit.

Anyway , good luck on your next project.

JabacOrdof

I kept seeing Marmoset Toolbag mentioned on other people's threads and the renders always looked so nice, so that's a great idea. And I completely agree about the UV space, if I were to choose something to go back and redo it would be the distribution of the UVs. Its been probably the hardest part of modeling for me to get a handle on, but I think I'm almost there. Thank you for the feedback!