The facial hair has been done using fiber mesh and tool which is new to me, i am happy with the results and any advice on potential issues baking this amount of detail onto the normal maps would be a great help.
The flow of the unwraps seem smooth and overall reasonably well spaced other than on difficult areas where this is difficult to avoid.
Jacket, Shirt and Wires
Pants , Boots and clasps
Third Arm, Armour. Pivots, Back Gadgets
The Face,body and arms uv will be uploaded soon once finished.
This image shows the current version of the low poly face and poly modelled hair. The hair totals in 646 polys atm and the texture used is just a place holder to give me an understanding of what the final version will look like.
Your head silhouette is off. In the side by side you provided, the height of the head is WAY too long because you made the head as tall as the height of the mass of hair. In real life, there is space between the top of ones head to the top of the hair silhouette. You need to shorten the length of your forehead/top of your head.
Decent attempt with the clothing wrinkles, but I don't think you're properly approaching it, and as a result, it's affecting the realistic reads of it all. You need to think in terms of anchor points. I would recommend picking up Bogart's Clothing Wrinkles book, but as a starting point, look at real references of shirts, jackets, etc, and notice where the wrinkles (think of them as lines) originate from. These "anchor points" where the wrinkles originate and begin to splay out from are where the clothes are pulling away fro due to gravity. Notice and analyze these anchor points, and how the wrinkles (as lines) wrap around the forms of the body depending on where they are.
Your wrinkles, as you have them, only visually communicate "we exist!" instead of saying "this is the boyd underneath, and this is how we compress under use."
Practially speaking, the length and/or placement of the third arm will make it nigh useless Unless it's constantly only handling objects BEHIND this character, it won't be able to easily extend past the profile front of the character. Just envision the arm trying to reach past the sides of teh character, it won't reach far. The arm needs to be lengthened, redesigned, to be more useful.
Hope that helps. I can clarify anything if you need me to.
Your head silhouette is off. In the side by side you provided, the height of the head is WAY too long because you made the head as tall as the height of the mass of hair. In real life, there is space between the top of ones head to the top of the hair silhouette. You need to shorten the length of your forehead/top of your head.
Decent attempt with the clothing wrinkles, but I don't think you're properly approaching it, and as a result, it's affecting the realistic reads of it all. You need to think in terms of anchor points. I would recommend picking up Bogart's Clothing Wrinkles book, but as a starting point, look at real references of shirts, jackets, etc, and notice where the wrinkles (think of them as lines) originate from. These "anchor points" where the wrinkles originate and begin to splay out from are where the clothes are pulling away fro due to gravity. Notice and analyze these anchor points, and how the wrinkles (as lines) wrap around the forms of the body depending on where they are.
Your wrinkles, as you have them, only visually communicate "we exist!" instead of saying "this is the boyd underneath, and this is how we compress under use."
Practially speaking, the length and/or placement of the third arm will make it nigh useless Unless it's constantly only handling objects BEHIND this character, it won't be able to easily extend past the profile front of the character. Just envision the arm trying to reach past the sides of teh character, it won't reach far. The arm needs to be lengthened, redesigned, to be more useful.
Hope that helps. I can clarify anything if you need me to.
Thanks for all the advice i have raised the hair a little and moved the hair line further down the forehead i also doubled the amount of planes. my deadline is in a few days so i havnt had time to look into the other areas you mentioned. The arm could do with being longer, for the moment it will server the purpose of aiming a gun on the shoulder and i will try to pose it in some comedic positions.
Im new to rigging and skinning and left it pretty late in my project to do so, i feel the process went well and most joints deformed correctly, although in order to pose the character before the deadline i didnt find the time to delete the unseen polys and make a more efficient mesh. The polys of the arms, chest and shirt are still under the coat this made the skinning stage a lot more challenging than it should have been. I still mean to pose the character without the coat but i will skin another version of the character without it.
The face rig was very quickly done and is far from a professional standard but still worked enough for me to give reasonable expression to the face, this is best shown in the first pose images of the character leaning against a pillar. I attempted to create a look of smugness with the half raised eyebrows and smirking smile,i also rigged the cheeks to a bone which i raised and positioned to increase the prominence of the laughter line on the cheek with the raised side of the smile
I did mean to add control gizmos to the rig in order to make posing the character more efficient but i couldnt find much information on adding them to a CAT rig and due to my lack of experience i ran into many problems which slowed my progress.
Having now rigged and skinned a character i understand the importance of animation lines better and somewhat of how to make the most use of them during skinning.
All the texture sheets are 2048x2048 except for the hair which is 512x512
The shaders are quite simple most materials are made from just plugged in the textures to the correct nodes, the SSS map was a little tricky to get working well with the rest of the material and was blurring the facial hair, the texture was blurred and darkened in engine and an alpha has been used to prevent facial hair from being affected.
This is the first time i have used metal and roughness maps and have found them very effective, these maps give substance and texture to the different materials used for the assets. The metal maps give the armor plates and boot buckles a more polished look and they reflect light differently to assets without them, as i understand them a metal map should be completely white or black as no material is are partly metal in the real world however i have used a grey tone to the third arm to give it an alien "cyborgy" look and a half skin, half foreign material feel. The finger tips and wire staples are completely white on the texture sheet this mirrors the arm of Mass Effect character Legion as shown in the original design.
Replies
First time experimenting with alphas, i have done the same for the clothes and skin i will post images soon
The flow of the unwraps seem smooth and overall reasonably well spaced other than on difficult areas where this is difficult to avoid.
Jacket, Shirt and Wires
Pants , Boots and clasps
Third Arm, Armour. Pivots, Back Gadgets
The Face,body and arms uv will be uploaded soon once finished.
This image shows the current version of the low poly face and poly modelled hair. The hair totals in 646 polys atm and the texture used is just a place holder to give me an understanding of what the final version will look like.
Decent attempt with the clothing wrinkles, but I don't think you're properly approaching it, and as a result, it's affecting the realistic reads of it all. You need to think in terms of anchor points. I would recommend picking up Bogart's Clothing Wrinkles book, but as a starting point, look at real references of shirts, jackets, etc, and notice where the wrinkles (think of them as lines) originate from. These "anchor points" where the wrinkles originate and begin to splay out from are where the clothes are pulling away fro due to gravity. Notice and analyze these anchor points, and how the wrinkles (as lines) wrap around the forms of the body depending on where they are.
Your wrinkles, as you have them, only visually communicate "we exist!" instead of saying "this is the boyd underneath, and this is how we compress under use."
Practially speaking, the length and/or placement of the third arm will make it nigh useless Unless it's constantly only handling objects BEHIND this character, it won't be able to easily extend past the profile front of the character. Just envision the arm trying to reach past the sides of teh character, it won't reach far. The arm needs to be lengthened, redesigned, to be more useful.
Hope that helps. I can clarify anything if you need me to.
Thanks for all the advice i have raised the hair a little and moved the hair line further down the forehead i also doubled the amount of planes. my deadline is in a few days so i havnt had time to look into the other areas you mentioned. The arm could do with being longer, for the moment it will server the purpose of aiming a gun on the shoulder and i will try to pose it in some comedic positions.
il post renders soon
Im new to rigging and skinning and left it pretty late in my project to do so, i feel the process went well and most joints deformed correctly, although in order to pose the character before the deadline i didnt find the time to delete the unseen polys and make a more efficient mesh. The polys of the arms, chest and shirt are still under the coat this made the skinning stage a lot more challenging than it should have been. I still mean to pose the character without the coat but i will skin another version of the character without it.
The face rig was very quickly done and is far from a professional standard but still worked enough for me to give reasonable expression to the face, this is best shown in the first pose images of the character leaning against a pillar. I attempted to create a look of smugness with the half raised eyebrows and smirking smile,i also rigged the cheeks to a bone which i raised and positioned to increase the prominence of the laughter line on the cheek with the raised side of the smile
I did mean to add control gizmos to the rig in order to make posing the character more efficient but i couldnt find much information on adding them to a CAT rig and due to my lack of experience i ran into many problems which slowed my progress.
Having now rigged and skinned a character i understand the importance of animation lines better and somewhat of how to make the most use of them during skinning.
All the texture sheets are 2048x2048 except for the hair which is 512x512
The shaders are quite simple most materials are made from just plugged in the textures to the correct nodes, the SSS map was a little tricky to get working well with the rest of the material and was blurring the facial hair, the texture was blurred and darkened in engine and an alpha has been used to prevent facial hair from being affected.
This is the first time i have used metal and roughness maps and have found them very effective, these maps give substance and texture to the different materials used for the assets. The metal maps give the armor plates and boot buckles a more polished look and they reflect light differently to assets without them, as i understand them a metal map should be completely white or black as no material is are partly metal in the real world however i have used a grey tone to the third arm to give it an alien "cyborgy" look and a half skin, half foreign material feel. The finger tips and wire staples are completely white on the texture sheet this mirrors the arm of Mass Effect character Legion as shown in the original design.