Suzaku Hi-def WIP
polycounter lvl 19
I am currently working on a model of a robot from a rather bad anime called Horizon on the Middle of Nowhere. This thing was probably the only design from the show I liked, but even then it has alot of issues which I've been slightly correcting.
References used so far are varios shots from the show itself, 2 or 3 fanart images, and 2 images I have drawn of it personally. (which can be seen in the sheet.) I also own the official figure, which was incredibly cheap for how decent it is. pictures of that can be found here.
Reference sheet here:
Current progress is as follows:
Reason for splitting her up is... well, she's ridiculously tall. if I'd done a full render of the figure currently, the details would be completely lost in the image size reduction and/or render.
ANYWAYS, most of my changes to the design are on the torso and head. I felt the lack of expressive and definable eyes went against the design, as well as the extremely blocky look of the top... 'hat' section of the head. I redesigned it pretty heavily to read better and give a more pronounced impact, however I am not against adding a few extra things to it after I have reached the point of baking normals.
The body is made to be mostly one big chunk for ease of modelling, UV, and baking, as well as making it easier to re purpose for another project.
Current TODO list:
-Arms and hands
-Hair
-Skirt
-Possibly alternate head based on a friend's drawings
-lowpoly and then bake
-additional normalmap detail added via NDO2
please give whatever commentary you can, I'd really appreciate it!
References used so far are varios shots from the show itself, 2 or 3 fanart images, and 2 images I have drawn of it personally. (which can be seen in the sheet.) I also own the official figure, which was incredibly cheap for how decent it is. pictures of that can be found here.
Reference sheet here:
Current progress is as follows:
Reason for splitting her up is... well, she's ridiculously tall. if I'd done a full render of the figure currently, the details would be completely lost in the image size reduction and/or render.
ANYWAYS, most of my changes to the design are on the torso and head. I felt the lack of expressive and definable eyes went against the design, as well as the extremely blocky look of the top... 'hat' section of the head. I redesigned it pretty heavily to read better and give a more pronounced impact, however I am not against adding a few extra things to it after I have reached the point of baking normals.
The body is made to be mostly one big chunk for ease of modelling, UV, and baking, as well as making it easier to re purpose for another project.
Current TODO list:
-Arms and hands
-Hair
-Skirt
-Possibly alternate head based on a friend's drawings
-lowpoly and then bake
-additional normalmap detail added via NDO2
please give whatever commentary you can, I'd really appreciate it!
Replies
but no its looking really good im not charactor artist but i feel the angel on the fringe of the head is wrong and the but needs some work but this looks really cool man i cant wait to see you finish it!
The legs feel thin though, may be my imagination as its missing the girth of the skirt
Your shapes are clean, but they don't flow, which is a problem with animoo designs like this. Especially where you're trying to make a robot have ridiculous boobs, abs, and butt. You are accentuating those to the detriment of the actual design and flow of the robot model.
Which again, is a problem with designs based off bad anime and generic T&A.
the fringe, do you mean along the chin area or the 'hat' bill? either way, it shouldn't be a hard thing to fix.
@Kel-Shaded
yeah, I was weirded out by it too. the skirt hides just how thin and awkward the legs are. You'd think the figure would fall over without it's pose stand, but it's suprisingly stable despite the stalk-like bird legs. I'm sure when the skirt is in place it will look better.
@Vertrucio
It definitely doesn't flow well. I've been trying to make that better by curving the shapes out better, but it's really got alot of clashing information. the legs and butt being green were a very strange thing, since the color doesn't show up anywhere else in the design. It's almost like the skirt was added to HIDE that?
add to it, the shoulders feel overly complex, and the arms for some reason have hoses/wires that connect at the front of the elbow. you'd think that would hinder movement!
Honestly, most japanese mechanical design isn't this much of a clusterfuck, but I'm really considering changing even more of these things to continue the rounded form of the rest better.
But like I said, I'm kinda using this for practice for a more versatile project. hopefully that will go better.
Thanks for everything, I hope I can finish this thing soon!
Not in the mood to do super fancy renders of this so viewport screenshots will do.
commisioned a friend to make the hair to save time, and I've been largely working on the arms. (which are close to completion at the moment)
I feel like the arms aren't quite long enough, but that might be fine once the hands are in place. It's finally starting to look about right, which I'm really happy with!
any comments or critiques are greatly appreciated!
Kinda wish I didn't have so many projects going at once, then I could put more time to this...
again, any critique or comment is appreciated! I don't bite, honest!
Almost done with high poly. a few odds and ends to tie up and then can move on to low poly and baking. (Thank god, I'm tired of procrastinating on this thing. The less projects still sitting around the better.)
Do please provide critique and comments! DON'T BE AFRAID, REALLY. THE TITS WON'T KILL YOU.
in other news, trying to add some details. I don't wanna go too overboard with it, so I'm choosing things that are decently subtle.
Haven't gone through the hard surface stuff yet. it's all on a seperate texture sheet since I didn't want to have to fight for resolution issues. Still, the base bakes for it are done, so everything's going well so far!
I do a lot of anime-influenced armor and right now the most I can tell you is that your forms are too rigid. They don't flow well together. It currently reads as just a bunch of random pieces pushed together.
The arms are a bit short.
The proportions of the face seem off. The head is much too large.
Shoulder pads are too small.
Breasts are too large.
Waist is too thick.
Hips are too far apart.
Skirt is too short.
Overall, all your shapes are not dynamic enough. You should stop, take a step back, and look at all your forms. Go back with an FFD box and push and pull your shapes until they are as dynamic as that animation model sheet.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xpxy8rxovvotq21/ioXe0OK.jpg?dl=0
I was once told that when recreating something you should spend more time observing your subject then actually working on it. The difficult part is noticing all the details that make what you're recreating what it is.
The angles you provided are also difficult to really comment on. Simple, front, side, back, type of screenshots are best.
I went ahead and made a change to try and get the hips back on track. the legs really were just too far apart, it made things look off. (most of it seemed to be just modifying the crotch area to be thinner.) I'll have to do more though, it's still kinda off.
Went ahead and lengthened the arms a bit, but mostly on the lower arm (apparently the figure has a lot of emphasis on that) I do still need to add the tubing that goes on the arm, but that's something I was waiting on for the moment. (mostly because the engine this will import into doesn't have dual quaternion skinning, and thusly does weird shit with those sorts of pieces.)
Skirt can also definitely stand to be longer. I'm waiting to get it looking right until I have the baking done, but for the time being it works.
The rest... I was kinda annoyed by the proportions on the original. I felt it was too gangly and awkward looking, especially on the action figure. (that and... well god, just take a look yourself.) Another issue was just the huge amount of hard surface stuff on the model, and so I put alot of those things into the torso shape. easier baking, less mess to deal with! I can probably tweak the proportions a bit, but not to the point of the awkward no-organs look.
I won't defend the breasts though. I could write a million stupid reasons (beyond that I'm re-purposing the torso for another thing) but honestly I just wanted de big boobies for my own selfish reasons, haha.
I understand changing up designs; nothing wrong with that, but you have to realize that by making the waist 'more human', you're doing just that, making her more human. That results in the other areas feeling off because they're still 'anime'.
So you have to kind of pick and choose.
Do you want to make her more human? That's fine, but you have to go all in and adjust the other proportions to match a human's proportions more.
Do you want to make her more anime? Then you have to go in there and push the proportions more to be more dynamic.
What you're ending up with is an uncomfortable 'in between'. Not really human, not really anime. It comes across as just bad anatomy.
So pick one or the other and own it.
I dunno, what's everyone think of it? I went through and did a few proportion tweaks, it's looking alot better, yeah?
E: in hindsight, the tweaks to the torso are rather minor, aren't they?
Overall going better than expected. a few rigging issues here and there, but overall it played nice!