US Corp Soldier Character

manilamerc

Hey polycounters is has been a very loong time. I was working for a group who wanted to do an army game but the group sort of fell apart but I wanted to finish my character. There were so many time I've started a character and never finished. So I promised myself I WILL finish this one. If you scroll down to the bottom I have more questions.
Here is what I have so far




So When I start making my maps how should I separate them? What I mean by that is should I do cloth alone? metal alone? I don't plan on putting this in a game engine. Only for my portfolio. So far I have skin separated I wanted to leave the head alone.

Would you guys recommend DDO for this? 

manilamerc

I feel like I'm at the bottomish hehe. Anyway you guys have a nice way of executing the UV's

John Baxter

I might be wrong, but the feet look a bit too big to me.

Maxilator

Here are a few of the things I notice. Folds doesn't look quite as good as they can, especially in the groin area, the wrinkles on the side of the leg are way to extreme. I would say that giving a few close ups wouldn't hurt, cant really give you anything on the face since all I have to go of is a full body picture. 

Edit: If you are putting it in your portfolio but want to get into the game industry, make it so that it would work a game. I'd say DDO does a decent enough job, but personally I prefer substance painter, I moved into it a little while back and I'd say it's worth learning. You can pretty much do everything DDO does but you have much more control, It's a bit more work to use but I think it's worth learning.

manilamerc

@Maxilator

For a character like this how would you go about splitting the UV's up? For ex: Would I put cloth on 1 UV? metal on 1 UV? Some studios want skin to be separate for sub surface scattering. I just want this for a portfolio piece. What you think?

manilamerc

Here is my face sculpt I forgot to show

manilamerc

alright so I've been thinking hard about how I should do the low poly and texturing. So far the head UV's are alone. But everything else I'm sill not sure. Here is what 2 of my plans I may go through. Tell me what you think. This is for a portfolio piece btw. 

cameronhorst

First I should say I am by no means experienced enough to give definitive advice. I think It's looking pretty great! If this is intended to be a game character, and you plan on using a PBR texturing workflow ie (albedo, metalness, roughness maps) you can probably get away with having all of the clothes in one texture.  I would definitely do the skin separately so you can have more resolution for the face, and possibly add sss more easily later.

Count Vader

LOL good luck getting any feedback unless you are already an industry vet. Anyway, I wouldn't sweat the particular UV layout too much, there's tons of examples you can view and pretty much copy. Materials can also be separated by baking out MAT IDs, it doesn't necessarily have to be separate UV islands..

Adam Chilton

Just make the UV's as efficient as possible, by trying to follow some guide lines .

As few UV 'islands' as possible.  Every seem of the UV, is actually a break in the 3D mesh, creating more vertices in your model.  This is hidden from the user, because it would make modelling more difficult, but it is happening under the hood, so to speak.

Often areas of different materials are masked out using textures, and vertex colour.  This isn't something that you would need to worry about at your level.

Condsider keeping the edges of the islands as straight as possible.  This has two benefits.  Firstly, pixels are square (duh) so textures look better when the pixels line up with the seems of the UV's.  Otherwise you can see artifacts in the textures.  This isn't a hard and fast rule, because in production 3D it isn't as much of an issue when texture size is less of a concern.  The second benefit is that nice straight edges pack together better.

Pixel to Texel ratio... I know it sounds stupid, but it's a simple concept.  Firstly, what is the character (or object) going to be used for.  For most first person games you want to have more space on your texture for the face, than the boots.  This is because you see a characters face larger on the screen than the characters boots.  The ratio of pixels (of the screen) to the texels (a daft name for the pixels in a texture) is something to take into consideration.  You want to achieve a balance whereby the parts of the model that need fewer screen pixels, use up fewer texture pixels.

Stick with it, doing this shit is time consuming and difficult, but it's the foundation that your final texture is built upon.

Cheers,
Adam

manilamerc

Sooo sorry for not responding in a while........Here's how I seperated my UV's 

This is in Marmoset. My real viewing will be in UE4. But I'm just showing what I have so far.

manilamerc

how do you get rid of these seams? This is in marmoset

manilamerc

how do you get rid of these seams? This is in marmoset