WoW fan art, need your C&C over this please

Stexara

This is WoW fan art, something i saw coming up in the new expansion “Legion”

Modeled in 3ds max, unwrapped in zbrush, hand painted textures done in 3D-Coat and Photoshop, rigged, skinned and posed in 3ds max. 

I kinda had problems with adjusting the opacity/transparency/alpha map in marmoset, because i kinda don't know how to place the "gradient" opacity map, if you know what i mean, that isn't like full black for not visible/full white for visible, but something gray as half-visible. Tried with the "cutout" option in the transparency map channel with the .tga map where the alpha channel is done in PS as i would like it to be, and the "dither" option kinda did what i wanted, but it made in all noisy when i interact with the model/rotate it and all, but when i render it it's KINDA ok.

But nonetheless, i wanted your overall opinion and critiques for this one, as i gave it a fair amount of hours, and definitely learned new things. 

This is the ref i was using:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbaWdE5kt9A

Artstation with sketchfab and marmoset viewer:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/aEbR0

mrgesy

Did you unwrap this automatically in ZBrush? That's not very good in my opinion. You need to unwrap it properly by hand and make use of all that wasted space in your map.

Not a bad painting, I think the scales need to look more solid and sharp. Right now they're looking a bit too shy. You need to push the highlights on the edges and such. The red tattoo pieces around his legs also look too flat unlike the reference where it looks solid. Try painting it to look more like that.

Also you need more material definition in your texture. Right now everything looks like chalk without painted specular on the scales and METAL PARTS. The reference looks like they baked a gradient into the dragon, you can see the tail end is darker while the head is lighter to draw attention.

Stexara

@mrgesy
For the unwrap i made the seams by myself in max, automatically unwraped it in zbrush, and fixed some parts in max again, still kinda learning that tbh. The thing with the wasted space is that i kinda thought i was going to need to for some other parts, and left it there so i can add some environment parts afterwards, but kinda decided not to, so that's why there are so many blank spaces  
And yeah, heard a few times about the gradient map, but never learned or searched for a good tut for it, would be grateful if you had something to share with up your sleeve(for unwrapping these kind of things in max if you have would be cool too), thanks!

mrgesy

Stexara said:

@mrgesy
For the unwrap i made the seams by myself in max, automatically unwraped it in zbrush, and fixed some parts in max again, still kinda learning that tbh. The thing with the wasted space is that i kinda thought i was going to need to for some other parts, and left it there so i can add some environment parts afterwards, but kinda decided not to, so that's why there are so many blank spaces  
And yeah, heard a few times about the gradient map, but never learned or searched for a good tut for it, would be grateful if you had something to share with up your sleeve(for unwrapping these kind of things in max if you have would be cool too), thanks!

This looks like a hero piece so it should utilize its very own texture map. The environment can have its own map. For unwrapping, mark seams where they're not visible, like the inside of the arms and under the tail. Try to keep everything with the same texture density, unless your want extra pixels in important areas. After you detach the arms and legs UVs from the body, you can stitch them back to get rid of some seams.

For the gradient map, you don't necessarily have to bake a gradient. You can paint it yourself in 3D coat or Photoshop, you just have to pay attention where the light parts go and the darker parts. 

Good job anyway on this. Next time make sure you paint your metal to not look so dull

Stexara

@mrgesy
Yeah i try to do that in some areas, with directly painting over it in 3D-Coat, but i guess it didn't turn out as i planned then ^^
Thanks for your feedback mate!