Stylised Goatman Tribe

gastrop0d

Hi all, I'm a complete beginner modeller and have been working on a character set for the last few weeks.

It's a stylised goat man model for use in top-down viewed games such as RPGs, ARPGs, RTSs or MOBAs.

My goals are clarity and readability of what the characters are (goat people) and what they do (skirmisher throws spears, warrior charges in with axe, shaman casts spells). So I've avoided any fine-grained or noisy detail.

I've attempted a stylised proportion of about 4.5 heads tall, so that things don't look too spindly at the far camera distance. I want a chunky, almost toy-like feeling to the proportions.

The characters are about 2000 tris with their equipment, though the shaman has more.

Modelled & sculpted in Blender, textured in Substance Painter, rendered in Unity3D (is there an easy way to render PBR in Blender?).

This is the first character model I've ever really put together, so I would love any feedback you have!

Krato

These looks pretty good! 

I wish I could give some sort of critique here but I'm not seeing anything wrong. I think it's impressive that you made an organic model on blender, making organic models on anything but zbrush (at least at this time) makes me want to smash my head into a wall. Kudos!

Krato

actually, I may not be able to give any 3D modeling advice, but perhaps you could touch up the painted areas on the body that have a slight red color to them, for example the area near the between the clavicle, the skin along the hairline, or the bicep area approaching the metal wrist guards.  It's purely cosmetic but i think it would be a nice change. I think the hands are well done regarding the different colors though!

JunkieKong

Wooo goat men! The world needs more goat men. Looking solid so far, I like how they have different horn shapes and the faces are great. I kind of wish the shaman had tattered edges on his cloth, and I'll be honest the fur phallus business going on with the others is a little disturbing. Proportions are a little funky - arms look pretty long and hands look giant compared to the rest of the body, and that's only going to look more extreme from top down. Maybe the legs just need to be bigger.
From a technical point, I can't really understand why you have got unique UV shells for all the geo when (from what I can see) the textures are symmetrical across x anyway. If they are going to stay symmetrical I would just mirror UVs, saving space and letting you get better res from the texture size.

Anyway just things to keep in mind, you've done a great job for a first character model and I look forward to seeing more goat men.

gastrop0d

Krato said:

These looks pretty good! 

I wish I could give some sort of critique here but I'm not seeing anything wrong. I think it's impressive that you made an organic model on blender, making organic models on anything but zbrush (at least at this time) makes me want to smash my head into a wall. Kudos!

Thanks mate. I wasted a loooot of time screwing around with the topology before I really needed to - something that was an endless fidgeting session because of the round shapes and joints needed for the organic structure.

Having said that, Blender's sculpting tools really aren't too bad!

Krato said:

actually, I may not be able to give any 3D modeling advice, but perhaps you could touch up the painted areas on the body that have a slight red color to them, for example the area near the between the clavicle, the skin along the hairline, or the bicep area approaching the metal wrist guards.  It's purely cosmetic but i think it would be a nice change. I think the hands are well done regarding the different colors though!

Hmm yeah I can see what you mean. I'll play around with the tones a little when I do another pass at the texturing (after I address mesh feedback). In truth its basically just me plugging in a thickness map for the colour and forgetting about it, hehe.

JunkieKong said:

Wooo goat men! The world needs more goat men. Looking solid so far, I like how they have different horn shapes and the faces are great. I kind of wish the shaman had tattered edges on his cloth, and I'll be honest the fur phallus business going on with the others is a little disturbing. Proportions are a little funky - arms look pretty long and hands look giant compared to the rest of the body, and that's only going to look more extreme from top down. Maybe the legs just need to be bigger.
From a technical point, I can't really understand why you have got unique UV shells for all the geo when (from what I can see) the textures are symmetrical across x anyway. If they are going to stay symmetrical I would just mirror UVs, saving space and letting you get better res from the texture size.

Anyway just things to keep in mind, you've done a great job for a first character model and I look forward to seeing more goat men.

I cannot agree with you more about the world needing more goat men (and women...?)!

I've had similar musings about the tattered cloth. I'll play around with it and see what I come up with.

Point noted about the crotches - I was going for long tapered  hanging fur, but I suppose I haven't really executed well on it. I've tried just Ken-Dolling the area... maybe its better?



I also actually measured and checked the arm and hand proportions (rather than eye-balling it) and reduced their size. Lengthened and thickened the upper legs, shortened the torso a little. Here's how it's looking:



As for the UVs, good point, but I have multiple texture sets planned and some of them have asymmetric designs (war paint and such). I was also considering resculpting some of the fur to asymmetrify it, but maybe having the increased texture resolution is a better benefit. One problem I have with X-mirroring the texture is it can create a big vertical seam artifact right down the middle of the model. Just something I've noticed with other models - maybe its a quirk of Unity?

Thank you so much for the feedback so far

gastrop0d

Okay so moving around the proportions created an avalanche of headaches in readjusting the sculpts and the rig and the equipment and then reimporting the whole project back into substance, but I've finally wrangled it all back into a decent state.

Small update, I've ripped up the cloth section of the shaman's outfit:

JunkieKong

Yep the tattered cloth looks much cooler - just remember to render it double sided
And about the UVs, if you are planning on doing tattoos/scars on the body, then for sure it's a good idea to have the UVs like that. These fellas would look great with some tribal tats.

gastrop0d

Thanks @JunkieKong!

I've got a bit of a baking issue that I'm not sure how to fix, maybe you guys can help?



From what I can tell the beard geometry is projecting onto the chest during the bake. If I set the bake distance to be lower I start to lose high-mesh detail in other parts of the model, but the chin area is fixed. Is there a way to control the distance for a targetted area like this?

JunkieKong

Problems like that can usually be fixed if you make your own custom cage for baking - basically duplicate your target mesh, push all the verts out along their normals so it completely covers both target and source mesh, then give it a once over making sure the cage isn't penetrating any of the geo including overlapping on itself. Crevasses like under that jaw and armpits etc will be the problem areas.
I'm sure there are tutorials out there that explain it better than I just did, maybe check the Polycount wiki too.

gastrop0d

Thanks @JunkieKong, I ended up building a cage mesh and trying to bake using it but it added some really crazy distortions. But what I found was, the cage mesh let me visualise what parts of the sculpt were too far away from the original mesh and I was able to adjust the sculpt and rebake with more accurate settings. All the artifacts are gone now.

I'm working on some alternate themes for the goatman textures. 

"Blood" theme:


"Forest" theme:


"Highlands" theme:


"Strange" theme:


I know the stone on the forest theme axe is really bad, I'm planning on reworking that with more hand-painted edge wear and remove the grain of the texture.

Let me know what you think!