3rd Person Platformer - Feline Hero Character (WIP)
polycounter lvl 6
Hello all, this is my first post on Polycount so pardon me if I seem a bit noobish. Currently I'm a student at the DAVE school in Orlando and an aspiring character artist. Our final assignment this block was to choose a piece of pre-selected concept art and create a game-ready, hero quality asset from it for Unreal.
And to my pleasant surprise one of the concept pieces was an awesome character piece drawn by @Makkon
I got in contact with Makkon recently and he was generous enough to help me out, even going so far to draw up another, more up to date reference for me!
My current scope is to have this guy fully modeled, textured with PBR materials, and exported into Unreal within 3 weeks. I also hope to bust out the amazing NeoFur plugin to give this guy a really nice fur covering too.
Anyway on to the WIPS!
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Going off the refs Makkon sent me, I drew up a quick and dirty front and back orthographic. Just trying to match the style as best I can and provide good proportions for when I move to modeling.
First pass proxy done in both Zbrush and Modo - Made a very quick blockout in zbrush, retopologized the mesh in modo and made some placeholders for the character's accessories. Now to export the base mesh back to Zbrush.
First Sculpting pass - blockout the head, hands, and clothing. Trying to really create a nice silhouette that matches refference. Based on Makkon's advice I will also add suspenders to him later.
Went back into Modo to sculpt out some boots! I go back and forth between programs to work on different parts a lot. I feel like I produce better work when I bunny hop between parts of a project rather than focus on one thing at a time even though I know plenty of amazing artists who feel the exact opposite.
Pausing for now to await feedback from my instructors. And anyone here too who wants to give feedback.
So I took time to experiment with that NeoFur UE4 plug-in on a model of Nick Wilde I made from a couple months ago. -
The results after just a very small amount of tinkering were incredible. A real night and day difference. Definitely a plug-in I would recommend for anyone wanting to make real-time furry characters, monsters, or even carpets, fuzzy furniture or grass.
More updates to come in the days ahead! Any feedback and/or critique would be greatly appreciated! I'll do my best to answer any questions anyone might have about my techniques and work process.
And to my pleasant surprise one of the concept pieces was an awesome character piece drawn by @Makkon
I got in contact with Makkon recently and he was generous enough to help me out, even going so far to draw up another, more up to date reference for me!
My current scope is to have this guy fully modeled, textured with PBR materials, and exported into Unreal within 3 weeks. I also hope to bust out the amazing NeoFur plugin to give this guy a really nice fur covering too.
Anyway on to the WIPS!
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Going off the refs Makkon sent me, I drew up a quick and dirty front and back orthographic. Just trying to match the style as best I can and provide good proportions for when I move to modeling.
First pass proxy done in both Zbrush and Modo - Made a very quick blockout in zbrush, retopologized the mesh in modo and made some placeholders for the character's accessories. Now to export the base mesh back to Zbrush.
First Sculpting pass - blockout the head, hands, and clothing. Trying to really create a nice silhouette that matches refference. Based on Makkon's advice I will also add suspenders to him later.
Went back into Modo to sculpt out some boots! I go back and forth between programs to work on different parts a lot. I feel like I produce better work when I bunny hop between parts of a project rather than focus on one thing at a time even though I know plenty of amazing artists who feel the exact opposite.
Pausing for now to await feedback from my instructors. And anyone here too who wants to give feedback.
So I took time to experiment with that NeoFur UE4 plug-in on a model of Nick Wilde I made from a couple months ago. -
The results after just a very small amount of tinkering were incredible. A real night and day difference. Definitely a plug-in I would recommend for anyone wanting to make real-time furry characters, monsters, or even carpets, fuzzy furniture or grass.
More updates to come in the days ahead! Any feedback and/or critique would be greatly appreciated! I'll do my best to answer any questions anyone might have about my techniques and work process.
Replies
No worries though! When I start a character model, it can take me at least a few days before I start to nail down the more subtle proportions and angles of a character. This is the hardest and most involved stage I think, and it's the most crucial for everything that comes after.
If you need a side or 3/4 view of his head I'd be happy to oblige. It might also be good to gather a ref board of his gear and even cat pictures to help you make more informed design decisions and eliminate as much guesswork as possible. Unfortunately no concept can solved all design problems prior to modeling; sculpting and modeling is just as much of an iterative process as concept art, just a lot smaller iterations.
Thank you for the quick response! Yes, I really need to get better proportions on him and that will be my goal for the next 3-4 days or so before I'll need to move on to stay on schedule.
A side and 3/4 for the head would be very helpful! If you only have time for one, then a side view would be the most helpful for me I think. I've been having most of my problems there, particularly getting the eye shape, cheek ruffs and nose bridge width down. I also think I'll need to bring the belt up a bit to about where the elbows/bellybutton are to match the most recent ref better.
I do have a small ref sheet as well that I keep open on the side -
I also have a ton of zoo pictures on my phone of more caracals, servals and lynxes.
Anyway, I'm already pretty happy with what I was able to do in a day, and with you helping me I think I've already been able to accomplish a lot more than what I would have been able to do just by myself. I'm confident that I'll be able to get this looking as close to perfect as possible.
Plan of attack today is to take some screenshots, throw them into photoshop with your refs and do some redlines on the sculpt to see what needs the most work done first, then it's back into Zbrush to apply the corrections.
Took some time to refine the face a bit and I think I'm starting to dial it in. At least I'm getting closer to the point where hair cards are going to start playing a role in matching the ref. The side view is giving me the hardest time right now though and I'm not to sure if that's looking right. Will have to revist that later. I also notice that I tend to be very soft when sculpting and I'm neglecting some of my hard angles. I made some PS scribbles on areas I need to harden up a bit.
I also tweaked the shirt a bit and resized the hands because I made them WAY too big before! But I may have also made them a bit too small now... I'm not exactly sure.
First thing that I can say is that the muzzle is smaller than you might think. You can push the eyes deeper into their sockets, and the head shape can be shorter in the z axis. Hope that helps!
Thank you so much! That will help immensely!
@MisterSande
Thank you for the feedback! And yes, I am definitely going to keep animation and rigging in mind when I retopo him. I'll be sure to post WIPS of the wireframe when I get to that stage for advice since proper topology is still one of the things I really need to get better at. Where to change edge flow, where to place triangles and stars...etc.
Please let me know what you think!
To match your model I rotated the head drawing up a tad. Keep that in mind when you line up the concepts for your image plane.
With stylized characters it's best to try to focus more on larger shapes that affect the silhouette, and to keep a lot of the internal shapes simple as much as possible until you get to the last stages. The trouble with sculpting is sometimes we focus so much on those internal shapes that we lose track of when they are changing the silhouette of the character, and it can result in blobbyness and inconsistent shape language. The wrinkles in the pants, some anatomical details on the face (such as the ceekbones/gaunt) are affecting this the most on the character. I'd suggest directly pulling in the concepts into zbrush onto an image plane so you can check it as often as possible and match it directly without needing to eyeball it.
It might be a little late in the stages of this character, but Dylan Ekren (modeling supervisor at Disney) has a pretty effective method of nailing down the general proportions and shape language of the character in the first stages of creation.
Sorry that I keep hammering on proportions so much.
When you get to sculpting the cloth, I'd suggest a brush that I found on this terrifyingly unreadable site here:
http://sakakikaoru.blog75.fc2.com/blog-category-5.html (ctrl+F look for "cloth")
His pants are pretty thick denim, and that thickness can be exaggerated. The SK_cloth brush is excellent for stylized folds and if you pay close attention to how those folds affect the silhouette as you sculpt, you can nail it down with very few folds.
Once I pulled your refs into Zbrush I think I was able to get much closer to concept. I decided to cut back a bit on the cheek ruff though since the fur plugin will poof out his head silhouette a good 5-10% or so. That cloth brush Is also fantastic. I was struggling so much with the pants folds, and like you said, they looked more like chewed up bubblegum than actual clothing. After reviewing your critique I took a little break to refresh my mind, and completely redid the pants, this time with your advice in mind. The result I feel is 100 times better than what I had before. I know I haven't been able to match your concept perfectly, but I do hope that you like what I was able to accomplish up to this point in Zbrush.
Spent a bit more time modeling out the boots, goggles and pouches too. I have some optimization and normal hardening/smoothing left to do on them, but I'm pretty happy with how they are coming along. I was playing around with different ideas for the boots, and your sketch reminded me a lot of pilgrim style shoes so I turned the round piece on the boot tongue into a large metal buckle. Most of the details like stitching and metal studs will be normal mapped into the boots and goggles next week when I start texturing.
Will keep updating as more progress gets made!
it's his project, not really fair to tell a man how to shape his characters head..
although i'd say it does look a bit masculine if its meant to be a female.. but idk
Thank you very much for the reply! Makkon has been awesome and his feedback and sketches have really helped me improve my Zbrush skills quite a bit in such a short period of time.
@Tomiajayi
Thank you for your feedback!
I dunno I think I made the right call with sizing down the cheek ruffs. Any fur cards/ NeoFur I add should complete the silhouette nicely. Or at least I hope to get it as close as I can to Makkon's original concept within my allotted timeframe.
Been working on my retopo now! Going to shoot for having my low poly character mesh and props completely finished by Friday and UV'd over the weekend. Ideally I'd like to bake normals out by Sunday too. Will update with more screenshots soon!
@WallStaringCat Really great progress! That's rough that you can't spend more time in zbrush, but no worries; you did a huge amount of work for how little time you were given, just a week really flies by too fast. Also, I love the shoe buckles! Really clever solution. The pouches and goggles look cool too, I'm really looking forward to seeing him textured!
Thank you for the kind comment and feedback! I love platformers too and working on this guy has been a blast! While I don't plan on rigging him myself, I want this character to be ready to go onto the next stage in a production pipeline so I have been building his low poly mesh to be ready for rigging. Basically just trying to keep good topology in mind as best I can. Also, regarding the expression, I think you're right too. I've actually removed the eyebrow and eyelash geometry from the base mesh and will paint on those features when I get into 3D coat. I think the LP mesh is looking more neutral now.
Here's the most recent update!
The final High Poly sculpt - pieces like the goggles, hammer, suspenders...etc will have their high-poly versions finished in Modo.
I widened the angle of the arms a bit to make rigging and weight painting a bit easier, worked on the profile of the head a little more too in order to flatten the top of the nose, and I also added a bit more definition into the inner ears.
Low Poly and Retopo:
This is what I was able to get done last night. And in case anyone is worried, these colors don't mean anything. I was just marking everything a different color to help block out each piece. I'll have all of next week to place hair cards, bake normals and texture this guy. The NeoFur version will come at the very end after I've completed a version with hair-cards.
And this is what I've been able to accomplish today. I'm pretty satisfied with the result! Had to resize a couple things, namely the goggles to make sure they can fit nicely on his face, and I also beefed up the clips on his pouches by 10% or so to make them a bit chunkier and more noticeable. I really like how the suspenders came out too. I feel like they help break up the upper body shape a bit without being distracting.
And one without the wireframe on.
As of now he is hovering at 36,149 tris including all the accessories And I'll spend a bit of time tonight optimizing geo to hopefully get him down to 34K. I'm sure I could easily add another thousand just with fur cards and I definitely want to stay under 40K total. He's going to be "next-gen" in terms of polycount and textures, but I still don't want to go higher than needed just for efficiency's sake. I couldn't find any poly count data for Ratchet on the PS4, so I used Overwatch in-game models as a baseline and they all hovered anywhere from 30K to 50K (character + weapon).
More updates to come, but probably not much for this weekend. I'm UVing everything tomorrow and Sunday, and there's just not a lot of interesting things to show there. Thank you to everyone again for being so encouraging and giving me some awesome feedback! I'm listening to everyone's critiques and doing my best to implement changes while keeping to my schedule.
Here's a before and after shot in Unreal. The normals on the goggles are a bit messed up, but cleaning those up wont take long.
Also yes, my instructor wants me to do the fur card version first, and then the NeoFur version will be done after that.
Started laying down flats in Photoshop for the diffuse map and I'll soon take him into 3DCoat for the final painting passes before moving on to roughness and metalness textures.
Keep it up dude!
Just a bit more progress today! Cut about 4K tris doing a few optimization passes, and worked on fixing seam lines in 3DCoat.
Regarding triangulating edges, yes most of my instructors do frown upon it but only during the initial modeling phase when quads give cleaner loops. Now that I'm pretty much done with the retopo and normal bake I've been allowed to start collapsing edges to reduce and triangulate.
Diffuse still has a bit of work left before moving on, but I'm still on schedule to finish texturing by the end of the week!
I was wondering why you darkened his stripes? The previous update had them closer to the concept I think.
And I'd suggest applying a subtle hue shift on the stripes from top to bottom - notice how (in the concept) they go a little bluer and darker toward the tail end.
Again, great work
I also took your advice and added a hue adjustment to the ear and tail tips to shift it to a more purplish cooler color. I really think it adds a lot more to the color scheme and matches concept much better, thanks!
@Maxilator Thank you for your feedback too! I see what you mean, now that you mentioned it, he does look a bit cross-eyed. Funny how I just didn't notice it before. I made sure to rotate them a bit to be more centered now. I hope you think they look better!
Marmoset render - First metalness and roughness test with fur cards applied.
Unreal render
I really want to get my rendering skills down in Unreal properly but as you can see, I'm having a hard time. The first thing is getting the eyes to reflect light properly. In Marmoset it's just as simple as checking "additive transparency" to the anterior eye material, but I can't seem to get my eye materials to reflect light the same way in Unreal. I'd also like to figure out how to use an HDRI as a backdrop to properly test reflectivity and metalness in engine. I'm still a big novice when it comes to this engine so I'm probably going to run into quite a few problems figuring this all out. I've contacted my instructor to help me with these issues, but any help here would be greatly appreciated too!
As of now I downloaded this "Showcase Blueprint" to help me get Unreal to function more like Marmoset - https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?55010-Free-Asset-Showcase-Blueprint-(-showcase-your-models-with-ease-
Hopefully this wont be too tough to figure out.
from what I remember its part of the post process volume. I use unity 3d a lot more than ue4 though so Im no expert.
Yeah, the fur cards really do add quite a bit to the character now. Unfortunately I didn't exactly plan this character out with poly-cards being the primary goal for fur and I'm reaping the consequences of that decision now. I still plan on using NeoFur to make this guy look awesome, but for my assignment I need to turn in a version with fur cards as proof of my ability to make them. If I had to start over again, I would've placed the body on a separate map so I could maximize texel density for creating the fur opacity mask. In regards to the fur silhouette change, I'll continue to work on that more! I was able to reduce the graininess a bit by switching AA to temporal in the post process volume. I also added more cards to the cheeks and shoulders to buff them out more. I have just under 1K polys left to play with before I hit my 40K cap so I'll throw the rest into more fur cards.
As far as HDRI is concerned, after downloading that blueprint, I'd say the results are pretty awesome! Still not as detailed or as intuitive as marmoset but it helps set up a showcase environment well enough, and after a bit of tweaking I think I'll be able to get this looking nice!
Also I really love that plague doctor mask in your icon. I looked through your portfolio and I'm really impressed by your leather and cloth textures. I hope I can come close to something like that with this character even though I wont have as much texel density to work with.
Default unreal vs Showcase Blueprint in use (same 3 point lights used in each shot).
@Ged
Thank you so much for that link! While it wasn't exactly what I was looking for, it really helped me understand reflections a bit better and from that I was able to find http://forum.unity3d.com/attachments/fresnel_examples_smaller_213-jpg.8662/ and https://answers.unrealengine.com/storage/temp/28719-reflections02.jpg
I was able to apply this to the anterior eye material and get more realistic looking reflections in the eye.
And this last one is really large.
Also I just realized I made a mistake when I modeled him with his feet at an angle. He would be much easier to rig with his feet facing forward and parallel, while I don't think I can get his feet perfectly parallel now, I'll do my best to eyeball it when I get back to work.
The fur cards appear a tad lumpy and break up the silhouette on the cheeks. I think adding at least one more furcard to the shoulders to ease into the shape more smoothing might be needed. Those colored stripes of course make that a tad difficult.
Really loving the leather and metal materials!
Thank you man! I did a bit more work today polishing everything up, and I'm really happy with how it's all coming along. I went back to lighten the fur to match concept better, added some seams and pocket normals to the pants, scaled the iris and pupil down a few pixels and just refined the roughness a bit to make the canister on his back less wet looking.
I'm really pleased with the leather material as well. Getting the right metal and roughness tone took a lot of trial and error. Photoshop definitely makes for more work, but I agree that it was the right decision for us to learn it the hard way like this. Definitely helps the whole class understand how all the maps work and how to properly interpret a metal/roughness map. That being said, I'm so ready to move onto a specific program that's designed for this sort of work
The fur cards have been a pain this whole time. Part of it is because my lack of experience and having to go at a pretty slow pace to get placement down, but I also UV'd this guy with NeoFur in mind and the texel density of his face and body just isn't high enough to get as much detail as I would like. I spent another couple hours reshaping and "trimming" the face and shoulder fur a bit to try and make it read better. Tomorrow I'll add his whiskers.
Threw him into Mixamo real quick to get a simple auto-rig on him. It's by no means perfect but definitely helped get me started.
At this point, he's more or less done in the texturing phase and I'm about 1/2 a day ahead of schedule so I should be able to quickly model and texture a base for him to stand on. I'm thinking something like a giant blued-steel gear would compliment his character and color scheme well. I'll take a couple hours to polish some stuff tomorrow like enhancing the front pocket normals on his pants.
Need to go back into Photoshop and see if I can fix the fur card texture to match the stripe pattern better.
Had to remove the hammer and tail to use Mixamo properly. Elbow and shoulder joints aren't deforming properly so I'll need to redo the rig and remove the goggles to correct that.
After I'm done with the cards I'll tweak the pose and push his left elbow out more.
Edit - no go on the fur cards. They are just too time consuming, and after 3 hours I haven't been able to make his fur tufts look any better. So I'm going to keep what I have now and start on to the neofur version to really push this guy!
I will definitely be using this tool for all future furry details on characters or clothing.
And I really love this last one!
Thank you so much to everyone who commented and provided feedback! It's very encouraging as a student to get this kind of a warm reception into a professional art community. You guys really helped me become a stronger artist because of it. Once I create a presentation blueprint for this guy, I'll render out a turntable with a wind effect to really show the fur in motion.
More projects to come in the future!