Hard-Surface Ninja Dude looking for some feedback

d.merticariu

Hey guys!

Here's something I've been working on the last couple of days following a concept and some tutorials by Pierre Rogers. Postponed learning hard surface in zbrush for a while and I thought I give it a try when I got over the process of importing back and forth from 3ds max.

I'd really appreciate some feedback on how this came out to be.


Here's the rendering I did of him. It was rendered in keyshot and composed in photoshop.


And the sculpt exported from zbrush:

Joltya

Model looks pretty nice. The biggest thing that's kind of throwing me off is the discoloration in the metal. I see a lot of large purple and green shapes in the metal. It looks like you were kind of deciding between a case hardened look and a standard metal look. It's too subtle to really go one way or the other. You don't really see a lot of case hardened metal in CG, so it would be interesting if you decided to go that route.

d.merticariu

Thanks for the feedback!
I was trying to achieve a look of plate I found on the internet, you know, with trial and error and such, don't know how much I got out of it.

Joltya

Can you post up what you were looking at? Also on second look, you really can't see the discoloration when it's in a smaller resolution; it's really apparent at full res though.

weiswayne

Nice work!
Joltya is right, the discoloration is indeed distracting at full res,
aside from that, you might want to make the armor plating on his thigh smaller, it looks really uncomfortable to move his leg as of now.

miamigator09

I think the sillhouette is really well designed and interesting, could we see the original concept to compare it?

I also agree with the others, the discoloration is somewhat jarring, maybe if we see a few different angles to get a better feel for the material. I also think the reflections are way too tight and mirror-like, and don't match the grainy rough surface the diffuse is showing.

d.merticariu

Hey guys! Thanks for the feedback!

Here's the concept made by Pierre Rogers:



I tried many different version, I also thought that it might have problems moving becouse of their big size and initially I thought of changing their positioning to the positioning that was used in the armors that samurai warriors used to have. I changed that thought because I wanted to keep the positioning of the concept. I have to work on those reflections asap though.

System

Not sure if you're gonna retope the armor pieces but I think you should make clean meshes beacause the blobiness/wavinmess of some parts of the armor detracts from the overall character. I also think that the leg armor plates and the armor covering his abdomen on the original concept are way cooler. The overall proportions are also cooler in the original design in my honest opinion.

To me it also seems that some of the armor on the back for example doesn't sit as snug on the character as in the concept.

Rendering wise you should up the irradiance rays of your GI to get rid of that noise on your metal since that's the main material of this character and you should focus on nailing that.

With the face mask I think you did a great job but I think you should make that hard case computer thingy he's got on his head. Keep it up and I suggest looking for inspiration from a lot of awesome hard surface artists like Bulgarov, Snefer, Nash and what have you.

d.merticariu

Hey, thanks for your reply and for the sugestions. I'm not going to apply anything from that to this character because what I had in my head for this guy is allready done, even though I'm not completly satisfied with him and it has it's errors most of which you noticed yourself, his soulpurpouse was to help me practice some hard surface techniques in zbrush. I'm not really into mecha and hard surface stuff though, I like fantasy, organic and humanoid characters way better but I consider that it's good to know a bit of everything, you never know when it's needed. I'll further my hard surface practice on other ocasions though.

And the artists you recomended are awesome, thank you for that! And thanks for the overall feedback aswell!

P.S.: Forgot about this post, sorry, for my delayed answer. XD

Cheers!