Ketura's workshop

ketura

Hey, all!  New to polycount, decided to post a Lina set I've been working on for a few weeks.  It's certainly been a learning experience.  It fits the in-game polygon limits and is completely skinned and unwrapped..."just" the texturing is left, and fixing a few bugs with the model.

Feel free to leave any critique!

RossC

Hi!  The model is a great learning experience but here's some feedback from someone who's a bit of beginner as well.  While the model is good, it's also a bit too safe.  It leans heavily on Lina's already established silhouette and while it works on that level you should always try and play and pull out the silhouette, keeping the base of it's original form but have it form and shape into something else!

The shoulders are a good example of enhancing the silhouette but the head piece, the skirt, and the armor pieces in front of the skirt sort of conform to the already established Lina silhouette.  You don't need to have spikey geometry and crazy noise to break the silhouette, the item set just sort of has to have its own line/silhouette definitions 

 Are you planning on creating a high poly sculpt or handpainting the textures?  While exceptional texturing and digital painting can make up for no high poly sculpt, just having a sculpt will give you a good base to work with when you start on your textures and of course will give you a precise normal map for everything.

Keep working on it!  

ketura

Thanks for the kind words!

RossC said:

While the model is good, it's also a bit too safe.  It leans heavily on Lina's already established silhouette and while it works on that level you should always try and play and pull out the silhouette, keeping the base of it's original form but have it form and shape into something else!

This is an interesting perspective.  One thing I've tried to be sensitive to during the design process was the ability to mix'n'match different sets, as that's my preferred way of customizing heroes myself.  While the set should stand well on it's own, I also want the individual pieces to be able to be swapped around with other sets...this limits how crazy I can get if it's going to play well with others.  The dress-thing was at one point a cape-thing that emerged from the shoulders, but there wasn't really a good way to do this that would look good if a different neck piece was used, and so it eventually turned into a much more conservative dress-like object.

Still, you've put into words why the shoulders work the best out of the whole thing, so I'll need to revisit the rest with that in mind.  The head piece in particular, while it works, could stand to be more elaborate; it is certainly lacking a certain oomph.  This may require me to model my own hair, which was something that I didn't want to do as I like the base model so much, but I may just need to suck it up and do it anyway.

RossC said:

 Are you planning on creating a high poly sculpt or handpainting the textures?  While exceptional texturing and digital painting can make up for no high poly sculpt, just having a sculpt will give you a good base to work with when you start on your textures and of course will give you a precise normal map for everything.

Handpainting was what I was going to do, I think.  When it comes to 3D modeling, I'm a sketcher and not a painter, so to speak, and I'm much more comfortable in low poly than high poly.  Case in point: I had no concept art and just built and iterated with the mesh as my canvas.

I think what I'm going to do is finish a first pass with the textures and see where that takes the model, and then go back and revisit problem areas if it turns out to need further mesh iteration.  Thanks a lot for your comment, you've given me a lot to think about.