How do you create non-stiff character ?? (sculpting)
polycounter lvl 12
You know, like, during production/sculpting process. Making a nice character that feels weighted, and alive makes the piece look rly good even in early stage of character creation. Otherwise it just looks..... wrong.
I look at other people's creations, even in early stage, and they look so good. Even without much details or anatomy yet.
... I mostly do female characters and thus I am mostly referring to them now.
Here's mine... (working on Comicon 2015)(Looks much worse when I start adding armor pieces on her...) Why does mine look stiff ??? Why isn't she looking alive ??
And here are the nice examples I was taking about. Even in the same stance, these look so much better and feel so much better. They feel alive and taking a stance. How did they do it ??? What am I missing ???
I wanna become a better artist....
I look at other people's creations, even in early stage, and they look so good. Even without much details or anatomy yet.
... I mostly do female characters and thus I am mostly referring to them now.
Here's mine... (working on Comicon 2015)(Looks much worse when I start adding armor pieces on her...) Why does mine look stiff ??? Why isn't she looking alive ??
And here are the nice examples I was taking about. Even in the same stance, these look so much better and feel so much better. They feel alive and taking a stance. How did they do it ??? What am I missing ???
I wanna become a better artist....
Replies
Anatomy is one thing, but it's so often taught as just the muscles and bones and not the way it sits in the real world. Your character is like floating in a space station without gravity or life. You stand with weight and your bones and muscles have to hold that weight. Fat sags, boobs sag, muscles even sag.
That's from Drawing with Force by Mike Mattesi. That's a great book, and there are undoubtedly others people can suggest.
Look into animator's books. Nothing flows better than movement.
Quote from earlier:
Especially since I actually know you a little bit, I'll really emphasize buying Drawn to Life. It's got a lot of incredibly motivating notes, along with some really useful tips regarding capturing the essence of a pose-- which will of course help with a neutral pose, too.
That's just my uneducated opinion
SO much work to do now !!
On one hand, there is indeed a need to breathe life into characters, by giving them hints of natural curvature and balance. The examples you posted are great illustrations of that. Not only is it accurate to real life, but it also sells the model better for review.
But on the other hand, there is a limit to the amount of swing one can/should give to a model, because past a certain point it actually becomes a hindrance to the riggers and animators, who then have to "untwist" things on their own. For instance, even though a relaxed hand tend to take a bowl shape with the fingers gently curving in, I don't think a game model hand should be modeled that way, because it will only cause issues down the line.
Now I do agree with what everyone has been saying - there is an art to making models that look and feel natural, especially for portfolio pieces. But it is also good to keep production examples in mind, and I personally love looking at the Street Fighter 4 models in that regard. These characters need to look larger than life on screen, taking natural and exaggerated poses alike.
The Cammy model is beautifully made :
But the model in its rigging pose is actually looking very stiff.
More examples :
I personally love these, because it is obvious that they will be straightforward to rig and animate, but still, they have that x-factor that makes them convincing and (potentially) full of life.
for my own work, gesture is the primary concern, not what works best for animation since i am not sending it off to an animator.
one thing i would definitely suggest you keep in mind on top of the other great suggestions here is don't ignore the side view. a nice gestural side view of the character really helps you find the center of mass and plumb line of the body as well as emphasizing the weight or frailty of a character.
@sulzbunny You mean like weight balance ?
yep yep
Hm, alright, but I'm gonna weigh in and say that these for the most part, actually aren't all that stiff-- they're still dynamic and have a clear rhythm, even if the pose they're in is a straight-up Star. You can have them in any pose suitable for your game and still achieve good rhythm and flow, and these are a perfect (though extreme) example of that.
Pyr, I hope you don't mind but just a quick redline and liquify for this specific piece.
(really messy and I'm sorry about that)
Can you see how your arm structure here is like a tube going into a teardrop shape with the thick end pointing up? The curves/straights that creates are very static. In the examples you provided, it's a few flowing S curves, often an S curve on the upper side of the arm, while a single curve runs along the bottom side (as shown above with the comparison). Your legs and ribs here also make a straight line running right down her entire front, again creating a static kind of tubular appearance.
It's pretty easy to fix, though, once you understand what works/what doesn't.
There are good curve/straight combinations for different effect-- certain flows will convey a sense of sexiness, awkwardness, heroic aspects, etc. You're getting really close, but these are things you should start to pay attention to when blocking out. :thumbup:
Looking forward to seeing this finished!
There is indeed a distinction to be made between the underlying bone/rig structure of a model and the rhythmic qualities of the forms of the body, with the curves and squash and stretch you mentioned. Going back to the example of the Street Fighter characters, this is especially noticeable on Honda's legs : they rely on a completely straight bone setup, but still have a fantastic silhouette full of rhythm.
Now of course these two concepts interact with each other in very subtle ways. The challenge of setting up a model so that it works visually but also technically is actually part of what makes game art so rewarding !
Fantastic paintover btw. My only nitpick would be about the hand and fingers, which I believe would benefit from being straightened out to give them dynamic tension, which in turn would also allow for cleaner rigging and animation transfer - like on this image posted earlier :
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/cc/9a/73/cc9a733fd3868f13f9d149b1e86eef96.jpg
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Roguedevelopmentdiary
Ah, yeah. I forgot to mention it because I couldn't liquify a better result-- That's entirely on-point.
(Also, thanks, Pior. :poly136:)
@almighty_gir
Ooh, that's an awesome write-up. That'll make for some nice lunchtime reading.
@almighty_gir I didn't know you keep that in the wiki. Awesome.
@pior Does it depend on what she will do with her fingers ? If she's gonna be pointing at something, then straightened fingers would be ideal. But if she's gonna be holding weapons, maybe relaxed fingers would make it easier ? What do you think ?
This one is a pretty good example.
I'm fixing her leaning/tilting back at the moment. Especially if she's on high-heels, she should be leaning forward instead. Then on to her upper arms and the calf muscles.
I think she DOES look more HEROIC though. OMG, instant visual improvement. What is this magic.
It's just super hard to control surfaces at high-subdivs, for all artists I think.
Practicing sub-div control, doing the correct details in the correct sub-div level, is a good way to get rid of this. My rule of thumb is that I should be able to smooth out the entire detail I am working on with a single smooth brush pass. So for instance if I am sculpting the bump of a knuckle, I work in a low sub-div. If I have a problem I can smooth the whole thing out without going lower in sub-div. Don't jump up until you absolutely need more resolution.
Some of this even comes from zbrush. The move tool, for instance, has an innapropriate falloff (in my opinion) that causes halos in higher subdivs.
Just my opinion, just a suggestion, but I think it could really help you with this exact problem.
Some lumpy areas:
I thought that meant either subdiv too low or smoothing strength too high; #_# so I usually avoid being able to smooth-destroy things in a stroke. That's probably why "your subdiv is too high" has been repeated to me many times already.
Now I know better!! Thanks yuri
When I was having a hard time with the same thing, people used to tell me this, which is why I am repeating it, because it helped.
It does help control the surface better, which is super important. But the other thing people were trying to stress to me at the time was more about sculpture in general, which is working in abstract shapes, which is something I didn't mention, but probably more or equally important. Using lower subdivs forces you to forget about the detail heirarchy, and work on general shapes. If you're sculpting 2000 polygons for a whole body, there isn't much you can do besides make the head 'generally head shaped'. Or the legs cylindrical, or whatever. It forces you to think about general shapes, whereas when you have 200,000 polygons you can easily (And I definitely do this all the time if I'm not forcing myself to have some discipline) get lost in things that aren't appropriate to be doing yet, like knuckles on a hand that doesn't have a proper structure yet.
Besides the smoothing thing, another way that I gauge it for myself is whether I can see the polygons or not. When I work I can almost always see them in zbrush. If I zoom in, I up my subdiv but keep it low enough that I can see them. If I zoom out, I lower it until the same. Its kind of the way the dynamic brush size works, if that makes any sense. It keeps you working in the same res, just at different proximities to the mesh.
Its worth noting that it's just one way to work, and just because I or others suggest it doesn't mean much if you figure out a way that works better. If you watch some of the naughty dog last of us clothing sculpting videos, you can see the guy jumping up a super high subdiv really quickly, basically before he even starts, and it's hard to argue with those kind of results. So feel free to ignore me.
I'm going to give this a few tries to see how it clicks with me.
+1 to Yuri's notes and suggestions.
Photos 2 and 3 on this thread have these points included. Your redone model looks a bit straight up and down atm (a bit mannish) you should try get that figure 8 in there somehow. Proportions are always a hot issue and what is correct but if you look at all the female character work that is popular then you can see the anchors come back time and again. The winner of the 2014 GA comp (Olga Starodubtseva), 2d I guess. Hope hot linking is allowed.
I reckon you could spread the legs a little on your base to make modelling the armor a bit easier. The head also looks like it could come forward a bit.
Just my 2 bob.
Cheers
I tend to sculpt in a nice relaxed pose to how I see is fitting for the character. Then pose it for skinning/rigging before re-topology for the low poly. So UVing, baking and rigging it will be in the correct pose. I might even do a temp pose for the low poly in Zbrush when texturing.
It's just way easier to check if the high poly is looking correct if it's in a relaxed pose.