Retrogasm 2018 - Zoe Payne: SSX Tricky
polycounter
SSX Tricky was one of my favourite games as a kid especially cos it was local multiplayer! Zoe was by far my favourite character so I want to try my hand at giving her an up-res (Yes I know SSX exists, I'm not even bothering with it 
) I'm going to take this as an opportunity to try a PBR character for the first time as well as improve my general anatomy if I can.
Final:
Zoe Payne:
First WIP:
Right now her arms are too skinny and her butt needs some work so I'll get started on a paintover soon. Also, I'm ignoring her hands, feet and face until I get the proportions the way I want them.
Critique is greatly appreciated!
) I'm going to take this as an opportunity to try a PBR character for the first time as well as improve my general anatomy if I can.
Final:
Zoe Payne:
First WIP:
Right now her arms are too skinny and her butt needs some work so I'll get started on a paintover soon. Also, I'm ignoring her hands, feet and face until I get the proportions the way I want them.
Critique is greatly appreciated!
Replies
Now I'm thinking about the outfit. I went through Zoe's outfits from SSX Tricky (and then actually played it for a while
Only crit might be to watch the draught / profile of her face. From the look of the 3/4 view her chin / mouth might be a bit far forwards.
You look like you're on the right trajectory for a great piece. Nice work!
About the face, I tweaked it a little but there's still something not quite right about the profile. I think it's in the chin but I'm not entirely sure what I should be changing. Any tips would be great! Thanks!
Decided to share my thoughts using the smudge tool and a gif.
I like lists :
- Lifting and softening her cheeks/cheekbone
- filling in cheeks a little more
- moving hair-line down a little
- lifting jaw-line a little and modifying it to a more 'kite shield' shape
- bringing chin back a little, slightly smaller and rounded
- Raising corners of the mouth a little to avoid 'fishmouth' resting postiton
- Filling in upper outer part of brow / orbit for lacrimal / tear gland
Most of these are reinforcement of feminine features. A really good resource for sculpting faces are the two books about sculpting portraits by Philipe Faraut. He also has a 3rd book on the whole body. He covers these sorts of features in a very useful way - even for 3D modellers.Thanks so much! I'll get messing with the face as soon as
I'm rendering with Arnold in Maya just now and have the normal map set to Object space normals as it look a little better than tangent space normals although, bump looked pretty OK as well. But I am getting hard edges throughout the object.
Any tips in baking would be super appreciated!
Now that I think I understand the workflow, time to go back and finalise the high poly and start retopoing for real
And back to learning how to retopo and texture!
Lots more to learn and a lot of work to do if I want to finish on time... doubtful
On normals; for characters / animated / deforming things you should get used to using tangent-space normals.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Normal_Map_Technical_Details#Tangent-Space_vs._Object-Space
Also a great crash-course on normals and manipulating them was the Varga tutorial from quite a while back.
http://www.paultosca.com/makingofvarga.html
Though newer tools are around that might mean you never have to fiddle with them directly in photoshop, I think there's still some value in knowing it's possible and how to go about it when you find a situation where it's useful.
> enough edge / bleed padding around UV islands
> decent projection cage
> appropriate hard / soft edge normals on the low-poly model (usually hard around edges that define UV islands, soft elsewhere works a treat)
> enough bevels where appropriate / not too much angle change across single polygons of the low-poly compared to the high-poly
Thank you so much! It's great to get some advice on this, I've definitely learnt a lot since my initial bakes and I've been using Tangent Space Normals since as I had found that wiki page on Normals too. That Making of page is fantastic and has soooo much info so thank you again for sharing. I'll definitely need to keep practising but thanks for putting me on the same track.
I've also tried hair cards for the first time and this is about my 3rd or 4th attempt of trying to get them right. I'm happy enough with the placement but might come back to the actual textures.
So now it's just trying to tidy and finish everything!
And I know my UVs are bad, it's something I'll maybe have time to fix in the future...