[COMPLETED] NEXT Girl
polycounter
Hey guys! I recently saw a character doodle by Serge Birault, and I really wanted to try my hand at making it a real-time character.
I'm still finessing the base mesh a bit, but I'm excited to work on the face and just try and push the style in general. It's my first attempt working on a human character with this kind of anatomy and proportions, so any thoughts or advice would be welcome.
It's still in the early stages, but I'll try to update whenever I hit some landmarks.
I'm still finessing the base mesh a bit, but I'm excited to work on the face and just try and push the style in general. It's my first attempt working on a human character with this kind of anatomy and proportions, so any thoughts or advice would be welcome.
It's still in the early stages, but I'll try to update whenever I hit some landmarks.
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Included a view without the glasses in case I need to go back and mess with some of the head / face anatomy later on.
I'll see if I can push the head a little closer to Serge's concept after I've finished the rest of the clothing. I also think I'll be going back at the end and replacing the hair with Dylan Ekren's Hairbrush to give it a better look.
Moving forward I'll need to add her hair ties for her pig tails, and go in and work on the hair to finalize that look. I'm still happy to hear any thoughts or critiques and would love to hear your suggestions in the meantime!
The hair baked turned out way better than I expected it to. I gotta try and push this one to look snazzy so any C&C is super welcome.
It's a little easier to see what's going on from the texture map:
Do I have too many vine designs (now known as devines) going on? Up next, I'll be working on a way to color in the tattoos and make it look natural, as well as starting in on the skin texture and basic materials for the rest of her gear.
also, Serge never seem to color his tattoos, except in this example, so maybe go for something like that if you want the colors?
what software are you texturing in btw?
You're right on about the tattoo colors though (and somehow I missed that) so I think if I do use colors I'll definitely have them looking more muted like that example you mentioned. For most of the color palette I'm looking at this apocalypse girl and I think it's the only other tattooed character that has some of them colored in.
I started things off in Photoshop but 90% of the texture work will be in Substance Painter. From there I'll be lighting and presenting everything in Marmoset Toolbag 3.
I'd take a look at the left shoulder tattoo. Right now the knotwork is considerably more inticate than on the rest of the tattoos and it creates a noisy feel to it.
There's a little noticeable scalloping on the shorts. This is easily fixable if you add a bevel along the seam edge or just tweak the cage for the bake.
Wristbands seem to look good in this regard. You can probably do to shorts what you did there and It'll look great.
Also, If you're going to do some bake cleanups, maybe add a little curvature to the tanktop straps
Also, you may probably have seen that, but just in case you didn't, here's a great breakdown that Vincent Ménier did for his Howler Bust not too long ago.
I'll see if I can't remove some of that noise and excess detail from the left shoulder vines to help it blend, and thanks for the great input!
So everything is still super basic / in-progress with the colors, roughness, etc. I still need to add her eyeliner and lipstick, and I haven't touched her nails yet. I might going towards colors that are too monotone or dark, but I'll see if some subtle color changes can help. Any thoughts or advice with the color pallet would be super appreciated! Texturing is something I desperately need to work on, so please feel free to be blunt or direct if you anything looks off.
Example of blow out and bleeding underneath the skin. Also a great look into tattoo linework. Generally something like this is applied with a liner, which is just a tight grouping of tiny needles.
one more thing, as a person with a lot of tattoos, they tend to be blueish as supposed to black
Here are some current stills for this pass:
The line art for the tattoos more blue instead of black, and tried to mimic a bleed effect with some blurring and different layer copies / effects. I tried soft colors on the tattoos but it stood out in the wrong way, so I stuck with monochromatic colors after all.
Everything is still very much a W.I.P. so if you see something that looks off or is standing out, please let me know.
I think most of the parts from Option A are still working out the best for the character in the concept, but I might change a few things here or there.
I might need to blend those sticker values in so they aren't popping as much. I haven't changed most of their roughness maps, so I'll also include that for the next update. Once I've finalized on her colors, I'll get into the details and add the blood on the sword, etc. An animator friend of mine is currently working out a rig for her, so I'll be glad to get her out of that A-pose as soon as that's finished. Any and all advice and critiques in the meantime are super appreciated!
I might have burned out a little on this over this last week, so I'm going to give myself a bit of time on a new project to recover my creative juices. I should be good working towards new updates by next week though (I think).
small crit would be the hair which looks very matte, Id try getting some anisotropic specular highlights in there.
I tried playing around with the Anisotropic sliders in Marmoset previously, and maybe it was because of how I unwrapped the hair or something, but it was giving me some weird seams with the highlights. I'll try messing around with it some more though to get that good highlight.
could you post a screenshot of your Diffuse texture only? I get the feeling you have a little bit to much baked lighting going on, especially in the skin.
Here's how the unlit diffuse looks on the model.
Here's the diffuse texture for the skin and hair.
Here's the same for the gear and clothing.
Right out of the gate I can see that I've overdone it with the arms and neck having too much of the shadows and highlights showing up. I included a layer with the occlusion map being blended into the diffuse, but I can definitely tone that down. Are there some other areas that look like they're really standing out?
the secret for stylized skin is its really soft, so instead of adding lighting to add interest, use gradients and colour variations, like darker gradients on the hands, elbows, nose, ears, and maybe some reds or blues for the eyes as well.
I made a paintover gif showing kinda what I mean.
Her legs are also seemingly an entirely different colour to the rest of her.
@Michael Knubben: thank you! Things really did get away from me with the lighting and textures. I should have stepped back and thought out a better approach for some of those materials sooner. I'll try and find a better balance with those textures and see if I can improve on it. I appreciate the advice!
For the legs I tried to make it look like they were covered in both nylon tights and torn leggings (just going off of the values from the concept), so I'll try to make those look more like a nylon material to see if that can help with the read.
@Larry: thanks! Damn I should have made that easier to see! I didn't know if I should have super noticeable shaved hairs on there, since I thought it would throw everything off with the rest of the character being stylized. I currently have some very tiny dots (almost like noise) on the diffuse and the roughness to indicate the shaved head, but it's impossible to see from a distance so I'll try to make that more visible. A dyed pink toupee might not have the "punk" feel that I'm after, but that could make for an interesting character!
Making a GIF of the hair is forcing me to use GIFVs on imgur, so I'll just post the updated and current version of the shaved hair.
Here's the full body shot with the same lighting as before (second lighting setup).
Are there other textures that I should try and change? At this point I was going to focus on wearing down or scratching up some of the luggage stickers, but otherwise would be moving forward on the lighting and doing just a once over pass on the rest of the model. I'm finding that I really enjoy texture work like this, but damn if it's not difficult for me to wrap my head around sometimes.
You've gone a little overboard on the saturation though, as now her lower belly and forearms do read as being quite sunburned. Take it down a notch on those areas, and it'll be great.
as for the nylon legs I like the dots personally.
I noticed something from your closeup with the hair as well, Id try to get a proper hair-line in there, just a quick example.
I also noted you have quite strong cavity and convexity map going on as well. Id tone it down just a bit If I where you, but most importantly blur it out so its not as obvious in the close ups.
another cool thing you can do is have a little bit of the curvature in the roughness map, so the convexity is a bit shinier and the cavity very rough. that way it helps the shapes pop, but you dont need to have as much of it in the albedo.
I'll see if I can bring some of those tiny dots back and try to combine them with the current tights to see if that reads properly. I probably went overboard with the curvature maps like you mentioned, so I'll try dialing it back a bit and add in a slight blur. Does this mostly apply to the skin or would I want to implement that on all the gear? I can try both methods and see what looks better. Thank you guys again for the great advice! I'll get to making some fixes ASAP!
I think my next hurdle will be adding the blood splatter on the sword and getting her all posed up. From there I'll be changing up the lighting and put her on a platform of some kind. I'm always willing to hear new thoughts and critiques if something needs further attention (or if I need to take a few steps back to fix up some of the textures), and I'll keep trying to improve on things as I move forward with the last lap of the project. Thanks again for all the help and critiques up to now!
So after some time trying to fix and improve on certain textures, I regret that I wasn't able to use a flow map or get the anisotropic shader working properly (I kinda screwed myself a little with the hair UVs and didn't realize it until much later on). Still, I owe a huge thanks to @Iotet for helping me figure out some methods and workarounds for my next character's hair materials.
Another thank you goes to my buddy Taylor Whitsett for working on the rig and putting it together in Maya. After noodling around with it I was able to get a first pass going on the pose. I gotta see if I can get the right arm bandage showing where the bicep is bent as well as cleaning up some stretchy business in the jeans texture, before going back to messing with those lights / platform. Any suggestions or thoughts are super welcome and helpful, and I'll hopefully be able to provide some consistent updates during this last stretch of the project.
I think you could dial back the noise and contrast on the metal of the sword a bit, its stealing attention from the character at the moment. also the blood could be more opaque, darker and a bit shinier I think.
On top of some previous fixes, I took lotet's advice and tried to balance out the look of the metal, so hopefully it's reading a little better (and less busy) than before. I've also darkened / thickened the the blood, and made sure the arrows on the sword aren't hitting the light and becoming invisible. If the contrast on the sword and the blood need some more attention I can definitely balance that out.
Next up I'm planning on getting back to some lighting and I'll try to get some mood passes going. For the ground plane I'll probably go super simple to imitate the original piece. If that doesn't work out I can make something a little more elaborate.