ArenaNet Character Art Internship
Just wanted to stick my progress so far at the top so people don't have to scroll through the whole thread
Original post below
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So I'm super late to this party because my computer was broken for the better part of the time directly following when ArenaNet posted their internship. But hey, better late than never. I've been in a rush to get as much done as I can and it's probably well past time to get some feedback, so here it is.
Obviously at this point I'm missing a lot of detail work, but I'm just trying to get major forms and basic detailing in for the time being. Already I think the neck brace needs a re-do, and I still need to make the little skirt on the helm and the blade things on the right arm. Some of the insert brushes I used are a bit choppy too and could probably use some love. Anyone wondering about the proportions, I built the base mesh alongside a character model I pulled from in game, so the proportions are 1:1 for a norn character with the exception of the head, which I enlarged a little.
If anyone wants close ups of any specific bits, do let me know and I'll be happy to oblige. Any critique and suggestions are more than welcome of course, that's why I posted.
Edit: It occurred to me that people unfamiliar with ArenaNet's art test may wish to see the concept image that this is based on, so here it is.
Original post below
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So I'm super late to this party because my computer was broken for the better part of the time directly following when ArenaNet posted their internship. But hey, better late than never. I've been in a rush to get as much done as I can and it's probably well past time to get some feedback, so here it is.
Obviously at this point I'm missing a lot of detail work, but I'm just trying to get major forms and basic detailing in for the time being. Already I think the neck brace needs a re-do, and I still need to make the little skirt on the helm and the blade things on the right arm. Some of the insert brushes I used are a bit choppy too and could probably use some love. Anyone wondering about the proportions, I built the base mesh alongside a character model I pulled from in game, so the proportions are 1:1 for a norn character with the exception of the head, which I enlarged a little.
If anyone wants close ups of any specific bits, do let me know and I'll be happy to oblige. Any critique and suggestions are more than welcome of course, that's why I posted.
Edit: It occurred to me that people unfamiliar with ArenaNet's art test may wish to see the concept image that this is based on, so here it is.
Replies
Most everything was done in maya first, then brought over to zbrush for uprezzing with the exception of a few insert mesh brushes (which I built the segments for in maya anyway) and a few of the more basic or organic shapes. I don't have the patience to manipulate hard surface stuff like that in ZBrush alone.
Just in case you want to have a look at my attempt.
http://kelseylightworks.com/2013/11/guild-wars-2-fan-art/
Just keep an eye the forms of that female Norn, yours seems to be a bit stocky in comparison to the concept.
The armor around the arms needs the silhouette to match the concept, currently what you have is very flat.
Not sure if you just haven't gotten to it but don't forget the tassel-type things that wrap around the helmets.
The calf and ankles could be thinned out more, they currently look very thick.
The neck brace looks fine, I'm a little worried that the carvings you have won't bake out well, if you soften them up it should do the trick.
I know the body/face isn't really the focus but I would fix up the face, a bad face can be distracting even if everything else is good. In the paint-over I made it a narrower, and adjusted the proportions a little bit. The nostrals are currently too wide, and the base of the nose is too high up. It's difficult to see the eyes but it looks like they need a little work as well, they may be too wide and it looks like the forms around them aren't quite right.
I like the way you sculpted the fur, it makes a nice base, definitely make some separate pieces for alphas
You may be planning on doing this but make sure the armor pieces have bevels and avoid 90 degree edges, it will make your life easier when you get to the bakes and will help them not look s flat.
Good luck and keep at it!
@popawheelie : I did notice she was starting to look a bit stocky. I think it's because there's a lot of elements that are layering on her hips and they're ending up too wide. I'll try to slim some stuff up down there.
@Alemja : These are great points, thanks so much. I think you mentioned a paint over of the face, but it might not have posted right. EDIT: just now realizing that you did in fact shift the head in the picture you posted.
I'd just like to ask, you probably use a drawing tablet: what tablet do you use ?
The design definitely makes the torso look long though. The skirt is suuuuper low on the hips and the ultra wedgie thong just makes that whole torso to hip transition very ambiguous. I'm hoping that's something that can be clarified somewhat when I go back and refine some of the anatomical detail where skin is showing. Right now the whole thing is very barbie-like and I'm sure that doesn't help at all.
@Mamiebrjota : Don't worry about your own skill level when making critiques. I would say that while skill level definitely helps your ability to pick up on things, most people's ability to offer legitimate critique exceeds their ability to create, and there's nothing wrong with pointing out if something looks off to you regardless of your own ability. If you frame things constructively, most reasonable people will welcome your comments.
To answer your question I use a Wacom Intuos 5, though in my dreams of being a wealthy artist I'd have a cintiq like they had in the computer labs at my college. I will say that Wacom tablets have an issue where the connector plug is not particularly well seated on the internal chipset and it has pretty serious connection issues if you start to move it around or keep plugging and unplugging it (this is how my Intuos 4 died, and even being very careful with my Intuos 5 it's pretty touchy).
The woman is a triangle, meaning her shoulders are wider than her hips. This character also has a very short torso and long legs. Your torso also feels a bit flat where as I think this character should have some abs and volume (they are of course covered by her armor though).
Her underwear looks to be sitting below her hips bones (not baywatch style). If you look closely at her more exposed hip you can see that part of her upper thigh is actually showing. You need to move her draped skirt down onto her upper thighs.
I would look at Taylor Swifts's legs for reference. You can see that from the top of her leg down are to converging parallel lines with very little curvature. The armor on her legs needs to be more like her arm armor and sit further away from her leg.
Also that last band of her torso armor should fall on the smallest part of her waist.
Her face is not as wide as you have sculpted.
Another over all thing to keep in mind is this character is tall and slim, but strong. She goes out and swings a heavy sword or ax and then comes home and eats a steak.
Hope all this helps c:
Also I would recommend fixing the face, I'm aware the ArenaNet people said that it didn't matter that much, but I would still give it the same attention to detail because some of the other applicants are going to make a nice face AND armor.
Since your face is missing a lot of the structure and landmarks I would recommend looking at this for reference http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=76733
@Chronicle : The benefits of going high to low are pretty significant. I usually start by making a low poly "block out" to get all my shapes, then move in to zbrush to make it high poly, then completely remake the final low poly to bake on to. Reason for this is that a lot of shapes can happen in the high poly that you might not be totally aware of when doing the low poly. It is much easier to plan out where you need the geometry and where you can re-use texture space when you have the whole finished model in front of you. You don't get caught up adding geometry where you don't need it, and it's easier to tell where you need texture space for detail and when you can down rez a little bit. The most important thing though is that your normals bake much more cohesively when everything is in place. If you're just painting on normals and building up the low poly with them, or worse, building the low poly assuming you'll just be able to normal and alpha everything out without guidance, it's going to end up looking very artificial.
As a side note, zBrush does a very good job baking normals if you sculpt subdivisions on a pre-topologized and UV'd mesh (ie starting with the low poly, and sculpting up). It's still quite hard to know where all of your shapes are going to be though, so a lot of people re-topologize halfway through their sculpt and project what they've done so far on to the clean mesh. This is very good practice for creatures, animals, or anatomy sculpts that don't have too many separate parts, but it doesn't work so great for armor since you mostly want to keep that stuff separate. It's also totally useless if you have 3D armor pieces that you're eventually just going to bake on to a 2D plane. You still want them to look 3D when you bake them down, but they'll be nearly impossible to sculpt cleanly when the edges are "fake".
Now the opposite is true for things like background buildings or trees that are going to use tiling textures. There are some situations where you can just get much higher resolution textures on to non-organic things like buildings by using tiling textures; or really don't care about there being visible seams, like on small trees, rocks, or bushes that no one is going to look at. Sometimes people sculpt out things to use on a tiling normal map and bake them to planes, but most of the modelling happens after the texture is complete. In this case there isn't really a "low to high" workflow, so much as a "texture to low" one, and it does require at least some degree of advance planning.
I hope that helped, but I may have also misunderstood your question, so please let me know if you want alternate clarification.
@AcidZack : The head is actually somewhat large for a norn (they have very very tiny heads). I built the model along side one I pulled from the game so everything is 1:1 to the in game model. I'm in agreement that there are some interesting proportions on norns, but you'll have to take that up with ArenaNet. What I think is an issue is that I don't really have any surface markers of anatomical detail on the body mesh, and that's because I frankly haven't worked on it at all since I first made the base mesh. That sort of causes a lot of areas to become ambiguous and messes with your interpretation of the proportions (especially given they're already a little weird). That's becoming increasingly commented upon, so it'll be what I'm posting on my next update along with the face fixes (I totally agree with you there). I'll keep an eye on the antlers too and see if there's anything more interesting I can do with them. Thank you for the feedback.
@Alemja : Thanks so much, that reference is super helpful.
I did a really quick color pass in substance painter just to get my color areas down, since that's a really great program for masking out areas in 3D space. Unfortunately I can't see back-faces in substance painter, if anyone knows if it's possible to turn them on please let me know. Google isn't helping me with this one. I also have alpha's turned off for the moment, but I left myself some texture space for hair tufts later on (so that blob of a back cape isn't going to stay that way)
Sorry for the poor quality image, if anyone wants one with more detail I'd be happy to oblige.
Huge thanks to everyone for their helpful suggestions, you guys really helped me through this.
I've highlighted a lot of what I feel to be the major issues on this piece that I want to address. If anyone else has comments in these early stages please feel free to pile them on. This is an opportunity for a complete rework. The one exception will be anatomical proportions
I've broken the low poly up in to a couple of pieces since I have more than a few tri's to work with and redid the sculpt. The fur will be added on separately since one of the problems I had with the original was that there was a very crisp line from cloth to fur that I want to break up more this time around.
I also have a redo of the underwear ready to bake on so it's not quite as wobbly (the original high poly for that was just a mess), but my next step will be unifying all the textures I have with the tweaked UV layout so I can start in on texturing.
So things are going to look a bit weird here just because there's no spec at the moment and I'm using maya's default viewport which is always going to look like crap, but I just wanted to show off the new cloth / belt. The last skirt was very "chunky", whereas I think this represents much more accurate cloth behavior. I also cleaned up the thong to be a bit less "painted on" and have been doing touchups in a lot of the unfinished areas. The boots still need some love, but they're moving along. All that's really left to do is finish up the boots, align the spec with the new texture maps, and pose it.