Hi all!
I'm finaly back after, I believe, close to two years since my last personnal piece.
Been very busy last 2 years with me leaving my studio job, moving to another city and starting my career as a freelancer but it's time for me to start some new folio pieces again.
It's good to be back!
I actually started that piece quite a while ago but then never got a chance to pick it up again.
As some of you may know I always try to have clear objectives when I pick a new piece and so here's what I'm trying to improve on with this piece.
Obviously from all the fan art I made you can tell I'm not really comfortable with making my own design, and so once again I will be using a concept art.
But the concept art was chosen for a reason, It's very vague, The details are not all clear and not all detailed for me, giving me the responsability to kind of figure it out.
This will give me the chance to really try different things and hopefully coming up with something without having to perfectly follow a concept art.
I also think that since I always work with clients, I don't get to critique a lot of my own work. I usually work under the guideline and precise direction of a client which makes it so that I don't get to often judge my own work and make my own decision about the look of a character.
Being able to judge and critique my own work is also being able to get a bunch of different critique from you guys, get different point of view and be able to decide which way to go and how to adapt to different critique.
Anyway, enough talking,
Here's the concept art, it's Shiva from FFXIV
Here's the first screenshot I posted few days ago in the WAYWO thread
This is where I am at now
Progress might or might now be slow, depending on how busy work is
As usual I'm counting on your for comments and critique to get the best result possible by the end.
Thanks for reading and hopefully following the process.
Also, Polycount helped me SO MUCH,learning character art.
I wouldn't be where I am without polycount so in the effort to give back as much as I can to this amazing community I want to really welcome anyone of any level to ask question if they have any and i'll make sure to answer to you to the best of my ability whenever I can.
Cheerio :awesome:
Replies
I see what you mean now about the vague concept art... Have fun with it
I`m not sure if you want to stray away from the proportions or not but I`ll comment either way.
When I look at the concept the main thing that is most prevalent is the size and proportion of the crown of spikes in relations with the head.
Yours seem to be much smaller compared to concept, and I think if you don`t make them clearly big and and clearly exaggerated / OTT, they might read as "wrong" or weird if someone doesn`t see the concept first.
Secondly, the upper body of the character is more compressed than yours, since I`m assuming he had to compensate for the long spikes. The space between the navel and boobies seems to be a bit longer at yours .
Also her pelvis in the concept art is more imposing, very square off, and slightly pushing forward. I think you might want to add a bit of that gesture to the T pose as well.
Anyway I know it`s still early but here were my 2 cents on the matter, hope it helps Looking forward to seeing this done
Vick
I think her lips seems a bit weird, and her torso seems a little short as her legs a bit long.
But I'm not an expert in anatomy.
Good luck on this project Marie, I'll keep on watching.
Just a comment, with the spikes, on the concept it seems to me that the hair is kind of wrapping up through the spikes, which helps keep them forms a bit more integrated, that might be something your want to do as well.
As usual I could be waaaaaay off so take everything with many grains of salt and sorry for the rough paintover, but these are my thoughts
Starting with the head, I think you can pull her ears forward a bit and her jaw as well.
I think her neck is a little too thick right now and could use a slight slimming and her traps could be slimmed a little bit too.
In the concept her nose is pretty small I know you're going for the spirit and not trying to do a 1-1 adaption but just something I would mention.
I think her shoulder need to come up a little bit and her shoulders could be a tiny bit wider as well.
Last 2 things I saw was that her crotch is a tad too high currently and her forearms could be a tiny bit longer.
excited for where you take this
The crown of ice spikes is super huge in the concept compared to your blockin. I'm not sure how closely you're aiming to match the concept but i'd start off by getting it's relationship to the head correct. The face seems a little large also, perhaps just the skull in general, but the features appear much more squished together in the concept and the chin/shoulder gap seems maybe a smidge larger. Looking on google it seems as if they settled for a more traditional face and head proportion quite similar to what you have for their final look, but again, depends how rigidly you wanna stick to the concept (which is pretty crazy!). The volumes you have going in the torso and the legs seem near perfect, really chunky, nice job nailing those. Proportionally though everything from the waist down seems slightly lower in the concept as MrHobo mentioned.
Super quick and dirty lines to illustrate. This is a sweet topic so i'm looking forward to seeing where you take it
I didn't expect that many answers, usually my thread start pretty slowly with very fews answers at the begining to couple by the ends.
So Since I got a lot of feedback adressing me not following 100% the concept, yes that's totally true, I totally appreciate you bringing up the front views to check the proportions, I actually didn't use the concept art at all in that sens, I just eyeballed the whole thing.
I did do some adjustement to bring the character a bit closer to the concept, especially about the ''spikey things'' being so much smaller (I was quite surprised about that one, I though those were huge aldready, didn't realsed mine were so much smaller!)
But I just prefer to say that since I work so closely with concept art in most of my client work, often trying to match them perfectiy, I just want to give myself some slack here and have some fun with it. I'm following the general idea of the concept and want to keep similar style but I don't want to really go that far as to match every single curve of the body to the concept art.
That doesn't mean I didn't appreciate your critique, I definitly did and you guys brought up some good points.
So I haven't had much time to work on this since I was trying to fix a weird scaling issue with the file, I used a 3ds max base that I often use, always with the same scale but somehow in this one the scale was all screwed and so my brush sized were always showing super small.
I tried different technique to bring all the subtool to the right size at the same time and most of them exploded my mesh but I ended up finding one that worked. YESSS so my dynamesh is finally working (I had to work at way higher resolution on the hair because I couldn't get the dymanesh to be lower density due to said scale bug)
So now the hair is super low rez but I'm working on building up the shape, still very WIP obviously.
reworked a bit the face, brough the ear forward quite a bit, reworked the neck, and overall proportions of some part of her torso. Lowered the crotch
Adjusted her arms, parts of her legs are still bugging me, I need to get back to those.
I made the spiky things slightly bigger but definitly not as big as on the concept (i believe, i didnt check), I think it's more of a middle ground between what I had and the concept.
Anyway, more later
cheers
Started working on the costume, just finished the basic blocking of the body portion, still a lot of pieces to add etc.
@AgelosAp Thank you! Glad you like the progress so far!
@BrendtheCow Thanks man!
@Montreseur Thank you!
@MercurialForge Glad you liked it, big fan of your last sculpt, the barbarian princess! Discovered the new shiva design randomly as I never played FFXIV, I really liked what they did with the concept art. Hopefully I don't disapoint for the rest of the character
So small update again, I have tried blocking the hair a bit more so that it's not just that random weird shape.
I've started creating the small detailing and border of her costume, still so much pieces missing, I feel like the neck part will add a lo of character once I finally get to it.
Hope you guys like it
but basically I wasn't happy about the way it looked from the side, it kind of had a curved bringing the hair flow towards the body and I wasn't too happy with it.
I'm still not even sure how I should tackle the hair in the low rez at this point, either as a sculpted mesh (I like to call them ''loaf of hair'') which is very stylised or with hair plane for a more realistic approach. Any opinion on this?
So basically I mostly worked on the hair, the hair shape, made sure every ''horn'' had some hair spiraling around it so it didn't feel too out of place.
@Blade113 @Dragonar Thank you!
@Magihat Right? I really do like the style they went with that one, I went to check how the ingame model turned out and I was actually disapointed it so low rez you loose most of the cool details.
@slosh Thank you! I'll double check the lower lip thingy but currently I'm pretty please with her overall face will see how I feel about the change. not exaclty sure what you mean but the size and width of the hair at front, I'm pretty visual so I'm not exaclty sure what you mean by that? I have reworked the entire hair area so hopefully I somehow fixed whatever you were talking about! I hadn't really worked on the horn yet, I did deform them a little bit more in this iterations but I'm definitly not done with them, will try to see what could make them look kind of cool.
I saw that in the game they made them kind of stripey, a bit like bark/wood which I dont really love, I would like to maybe give them more of a crystal-ice look.
The biggest issue, and why I am bringing this up here is your reference, If you want to critic anatomy, you should be using actual photo, that reference you posted is not good at all. there is a LOT of issues in this image.
@amirabd2130 thank you
This is frankly extremely misleading, and mischievous for you to try and convince people otherwise.
you shouldn't be using those as reference to critic on anyone's else anatomy work, please stop
Here's what you posted (and conveniently removed)
Heres the *NOT*''scanned ''sketchfab model and the link to said piece. https://sketchfab.com/models/9a893bbdc050422d95c54f913a5707a2
Which is a model made in daz3d/zbrush
Sorry everyone for the witch hunt but.... just seriously,
I'm no Scott Eaton but I'm quite sure I'm right on this and if I'm not you could simply ignore my criticism. No need to be offended you're a very talented artist, good luck to you.
How the hell did you think that was a 3D Scan?
- The interclavicular fossa goes into the middle of her boob
- Both pecs look like they're a different size
- Her boobs are shaped like sausages.
That's an awful ref.
Btw Tits modelled the lower part of the bicep 'pronated'. You're telling her to model it supinated:
The bicep (tendon) stretches and condenses based on direction the hand is pointing:
That 'crit' is a bit off-base when she modelled it posed neutrally.
Classy thing to do at this point is to not derail the thread any further and just fall on your sword. Leave it be.
I wish I had something constructive to add to this thread but your progress is solid so far.
I was gonna comment on the anat crit but damn, jacque nailed it. My 2c would only be that definition of the type mentioned varies greatly depending on a person's build and so long as the muscles originate and terminate in the right place it's a pretty subjective thing.
In particular, there's a lack of defined s-curve on the inside of the thigh on your model, and the crown of the femur could come out a bit. The concept has a tiny waist but huuuuuge hips, really push those forms
Oh...I suppose the classy thing as this point would be to raise your wine glasses and tip your fedoras lol.
@Tits Yeah, I agree about the ingame model being disappointing. A couple of design liberties taken with that does not sit well with me especially since the concept is so beautiful. From what I have seen so far I like your interpretation better.
@Tits love it.
Read what JacqueChoi wrote again. When the hand is rotated out (Palms out) it causes the bicep to rotate in the position you have in your example, when the hand is in (palms facing your thigh), the bicep will appear like what is in the sculpt. There is some wiggle room based on how far the rotation is but the sculpt falls well within acceptable boundaries.
You can actually stand and do it yourself in the mirror and see the effect.
If I am off in what Ive written and if anyone with more anatomical knowledge than me reads this please by all means correct me.
Having said that... Just stop. Leave it be.
This is not a "we hate you" or "we hate anatomy" or "we hate anatomy crits"...you're just flat out wrong about what you have stated this time around. No big deal, learn from your mistakes, and improve.
Honestly I think this is really solid so far. The forms and proportions fit the character and style of the concept well. I think you hit the nail on the head with this one!
I really curious to learn how will you be blocking out the shoulder pads and boot details?
Update on the character.
@JacqueChoi thanks for the amazing and in depth explanation as always, them boobs really do look like sausages
@MrHobo thanks for pitching in the thread as always, can be hard to find perfect reference picture as the hand do influence the anatomy of the arm quite a lot. I do believe, like you said, that the arm falls under ''acceptable boundaries''.But My anatomy is far from being perfect
@tda Yah I'm thinking about maybe trying to do a mix of loaf of hair + plane which I have done in the past but I haven't always been 100% happy with the outcome so I might have to try couple of things, Will see how it goes, I'm sure i'll find a way .
@almighty_gir Hey lee, thanks for the crits, I do agree she got quite some legs in that concept but I'm not really a fan of the look/reference you are giving me here, we are probably talking personnal preference also here.
I feel this is a bit too ''rounded'', classic squat legs wich are really ''in'' at the moment but doesn't reflect what's in the concept so well (In my opinion) .
I do want her to have an impressive pair of legs but I don't want to go all chun li up there. I did rework the leg tho, not sure how subtle it is, I added more of a curved to them and made them a tad bigger.
@slosh great crit on the boobs part, didn't see it at all until you point it out. Didn't want to go for the two sphere kind of boobs with massive cleavage, was trying to keep the breast natural but I guess maybe I let them do their own thing a lil too much, I bring them girls back together where they belong.
@Magihat Thanks man, hopefully you like the final result
@radiancef0rge thanks brah
@killnpc Thanks man!
@Asura Thank you, glad you enjoy the progress so far.
I improvise quite a lot actually, I never have quite a ''plan'' when it comes to each part, I decide as I go. I haven't really figured out the boots quite yet. For the shoulder area which you can see now I just made a quick basemesh in 3ds max which I moved and adjusted in zbrush. Made couple of different subtools for the borders and other detailing. if you have any specific question i'd be happy to answer..
So heres the big changes that were made
worked on the shape of the hair to leave some space for the collar (oops, tight spot there!!)
Bring the girls together
Adjusted the shape of the legs
Rework the deltoid-tricep area based on a crit i received in personnal messages, thanks @Oaken for the heads up!
Added the necklace and also some tiny pieces of jewellery at a couple of places in the costume design.
started working on the shoulder-neck area
I believe that's all for now
ugh I'm just noticing now there is stuff bugging me about the shape of her collar, I think it should be higher, what do you guys think?
Will have to rework that area.
With the collar, I was thinking it would look nice if you mirrored the curve in her armour... Kinda like this.