Old Mage with Staff

Doyen

Latest Update:


Hello, I've been wanting to work on a humanoid character for my portfolio with the goal pushing realism.

I still need to work on the specular map and haven't started the gloss map or alpha maps which will include some alpha mapped hair for his beard. I'm looking for any suggestions on how to strengthen this work. He's looking fairly lifeless now so I'll pose him soon.

The concept by Caio Monteiro


My current progress

SuperFranky

Looks decent, but I really don't feel that beard. Looks like you've overlayed a photo of hair on the sculpted beard, but that just looks out of place and doesn't work with the rest of the hair. I think it would be better to just sculpt better hair details. There are many great tutorials on Youtube on how to sculpt good hair in Zbrush, look them up; this is one of them - [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWF4SKhWKfI[/ame] .

BUT, if you want to approach this more realistically, you will have to make all the hair with alpha planes. That would be a hard way, for sure, but the result is worth it. Find some good references for the type of beard and hair you want, and analyze that.

I also think that there's something wrong with your proportions, his hands look entirely to big.

Overmind5000

Spiffy. The hair when meeting the scalp looks a bit like play-dough. His face's proportions seem stylized on a minute level from where I'm sitting, but the complexion in terms of diffuse/albedo and normal map works in my view. As far as keeping true to the concept, you did a nice job with the polygons you have. I will say that something about the sleeves is off. It may be either the normal map or something Ambient Occlusion-related, but Overall, he looks as one would picture an old mage.

Doyen

Thanks Franky for pointing out the hair problem, for some reason I thought it wouldn't be too noticable to just throw an overlay on it but guess it really was making it look worse. I got my hair planes going but they're a little on the lighter side for now. I had tried to make the hand a little bigger to make him look slightly stylized but I guess that didn't fit the rest of him too well so I've sized them down a little, the fingers are still longer than average but I'm hoping they don't come across as weird.

Overmind50000, thank you for the comments. I had baked many of my pieces separately so maybe that made the sleeves look wrong, I've added an occlusion in Photoshop on my sleeves so they don't look too bright.

Here's my latest update, rigged so I could pose him and spent some more time on the textures, getting closer to calling it done. Please any feedback would be great.

Poseidon8734

Really really cool looking! I do think the beard does look a little detached from the head. Maybe add some more variation on where the strands of hair meet the head. Notice how Gandelfs beard goes into his head in a pretty natural way.

Doyen

Thanks for the input Poseidon, I'll fix the beard transition soon.

Here's current in bind pose.