Thats a lot of polygons dude. Riots poly count limit of a normal character is 7k, max 12k with weapons and summons included. If your making a game model then reduce the poly count to 7-8k. Your highpoly is awesome, you'll get good details on your bake anyway. Ignore this if your making a fanart.
@ThelceWoles Yep, you re right. I am used to make characters around 40k in my full-time job for the games we are making so I will try to decreased the count to Riot standards
Retopo is looking great but i have to agree with @TheIceWolves , theres too much poly. One thing i would say you can do is making a "normal" polycount as you used to make, do some bakes, AO and block colors then come back and make a LOD of it, using a blockout texture as a guide so it wont mess your uvs once you make the cuts. And this would be the version used ingame and which would be your model for the contest.
Wanted to ask you a thing for you @TheIceWolves , is 7k-12k tris or quads?
Retopo is looking great but i have to agree with @TheIceWolves , theres too much poly. One thing i would say you can do is making a "normal" polycount as you used to make, do some bakes, AO and block colors then come back and make a LOD of it, using a blockout texture as a guide so it wont mess your uvs once you make the cuts. And this would be the version used ingame and which would be your model for the contest.
Wanted to ask you a thing for you @TheIceWolves , is 7k-12k tris or quads?
Its tri count. Not actual limits but they usually keep every model around 7k -12k.
Thank you so much for your kind words guys! I hope i will finish it on time, i had some personal mishap last week but now I am ready once more to work hard on it.
@doses222 This is looking great, man! Absolutely stunning idea and the highpoly. My favorite by far! Now that you've started the diffuse, there's an itty-bitty correction i'd like to offer while you're not too deep into the process.
1. Color treatment. Right now your texture looks a little off. this is mainly due to the fact that highlights on the texture are rendered simply by increasing the value of the color. Here's a little illustration to help further explain what i'm trying to convey
You can check out galleries of Riot artists to see up close the way they work with the colors. I highly recommend to check out Duy Khan Nguyen and Maddy Taylor Kenyon
2. Values Main range of LoL values lies between 25% and 75%, with miniscule use of values down to 15% or 90% for extreme shadows and highlights. This means that you have to check your models for extreme values and tweak them accordingly for your texture to not look to contrasted in comparison to current game content. This of course correlates to general topdown gradient that's prevalent in all of the current textures. this means that you will rarely see Large areas of values above 40-50% in the lower half of the model I'd say your texture is pretty much in line with what i've said above, with maybe some minor changes that could benefit the end look. From what I could gather from your portfolio, you're pretty good with Substance painter. I'd recommend using 3d light generator to help accentuate top-down lighting on major shapes.
3. Details It is very important to not have your texture look overly noisy and distracting. While it is tempting to delve into intricate detailing when painting a model at eye level, you need to keep in mind that 90% of the time your model will be seen from above and not larger than 1-2 inches on the screen.
This means that majority of the small details will be not only lost on the end viewer but also will create visual noise that might harm the overall presentation. What could be helpful is you could pick a visually smallest functional element on your texture (in this case a golden trim on the braid bead) and stick to it as your smallest detail without having any other element be smaller. Try not to create overly noisy areas that might draw too much attention to themselves. Eye tends to stick to rhytmic repetition, like with the notches on horns or knotwork on the braid, so these areas might need less contrast to allow to still have needed information there without overpowering everything else. This will help create generally even distribution of information and help overall composition. I hope im making sense here.
I'd say the color scheme is up to you, but it always helps to do some rough color thumbs to see what works best. Even tweaking the hues in Photoshop to create several thumbs could do wonders for decision making.
I'm a really big fan of your work ! Great skills and ideas there. The only thing that I am not a big fan of is your color choices. It's maybe just my opinion, but when I saw you concept, I though the final result would looks more ghost like, in terms of color; Like maybe something more green/blue, like LoL's haunted skins :
Hey, really really nice design and work! I have to agree with the others here, the color scheme is not fitting in my opinion. When I read "necro bard" I immediately think of dark colours: black, purple, dark green, dark blue,... Try out a new colour scheme with dark colours, I think it would look awesome!
@Svartberg Wow, this is an incredible detailed explanation about color! Really useful man, thank you so much for you effort doing it, I ll try to follow some of your tips and tricks and makes some improvements this week
@Haub@Shayumi I will also make some adjustments to try to achieve a darker mood to be in conjunction with the character's personality
Everything about your model is great, and the sculpt is pretty neat and high res but honestly I think you should get rid of that bake and do the texture from scratch on your own, everything about your model is great, and the sculpt is pretty neat and high res, but the bake is terrible for the kind of style you have to accomplish, you are falling prey to the dark edges a,d super brigh details that you get fom the sculpt and that means everything is going to have super high contrast, you seem to have solved a lot of these problems from the bake details already but working from complex to simplification is like building a house wrong and then trying to fix it here and there.
here is what I would recomend doing, make a new layer and turn your texture into a cel shading kind of render, basically what you see in pixel art where every only a few colors are used and no blending, if you think something seems off then that means you won't be able to make it better by shading, if the simple version doesn't look right there's no way detailing and rendering will fix it. then you just have to slowly build the forms and details in the end.
Replies
Working
@RogerP
Wanted to ask you a thing for you @TheIceWolves , is 7k-12k tris or quads?
BAKES
Now that you've started the diffuse, there's an itty-bitty correction i'd like to offer while you're not too deep into the process.
1. Color treatment.
Right now your texture looks a little off. this is mainly due to the fact that highlights on the texture are rendered simply by increasing the value of the color. Here's a little illustration to help further explain what i'm trying to convey
You can check out galleries of Riot artists to see up close the way they work with the colors.
I highly recommend to check out Duy Khan Nguyen and Maddy Taylor Kenyon
2. Values
Main range of LoL values lies between 25% and 75%, with miniscule use of values down to 15% or 90% for extreme shadows and highlights.
This means that you have to check your models for extreme values and tweak them accordingly for your texture to not look to contrasted in comparison to current game content.
This of course correlates to general topdown gradient that's prevalent in all of the current textures. this means that you will rarely see Large areas of values above 40-50% in the lower half of the model
I'd say your texture is pretty much in line with what i've said above, with maybe some minor changes that could benefit the end look.
From what I could gather from your portfolio, you're pretty good with Substance painter. I'd recommend using 3d light generator to help accentuate top-down lighting on major shapes.
3. Details
It is very important to not have your texture look overly noisy and distracting.
While it is tempting to delve into intricate detailing when painting a model at eye level, you need to keep in mind that 90% of the time your model will be seen from above and not larger than 1-2 inches on the screen.
This means that majority of the small details will be not only lost on the end viewer but also will create visual noise that might harm the overall presentation.
What could be helpful is you could pick a visually smallest functional element on your texture (in this case a golden trim on the braid bead) and stick to it as your smallest detail without having any other element be smaller. Try not to create overly noisy areas that might draw too much attention to themselves. Eye tends to stick to rhytmic repetition, like with the notches on horns or knotwork on the braid, so these areas might need less contrast to allow to still have needed information there without overpowering everything else. This will help create generally even distribution of information and help overall composition. I hope im making sense here.
I'd say the color scheme is up to you, but it always helps to do some rough color thumbs to see what works best. Even tweaking the hues in Photoshop to create several thumbs could do wonders for decision making.
There's a wonderful Dota 2 character creation guide out there that could be very useful and complimentary to all I've said
https://support.steampowered.com/kb/9334-YDXV-8590/dota-2-workshop-character-art-guide
Good luck!
Hope this can help you. Great work anyway !
Wow, this is an incredible detailed explanation about color! Really useful man, thank you so much for you effort doing it, I ll try to follow some of your tips and tricks and makes some improvements this week
@Haub @Shayumi
I will also make some adjustments to try to achieve a darker mood to be in conjunction with the character's personality
@andreygheorghe @otto Thanks you guys
Howling Carnage thanks for the advice
Still so much work ahead
Update colors
here is what I would recomend doing, make a new layer and turn your texture into a cel shading kind of render, basically what you see in pixel art where every only a few colors are used and no blending, if you think something seems off then that means you won't be able to make it better by shading, if the simple version doesn't look right there's no way detailing and rendering will fix it.
then you just have to slowly build the forms and details in the end.
Congratulation!
Thank you all for your advice and help.
I hope you like it.
@Shadyra @FemCharles @Artlficer @otto @chemotoledo