Hi everyone!
Long time ago I saw this awesome Tahm Kench Fan skin concept an decided to finally give it a shot. Tahm Kench is one of my favorite characters and I feel like there is a lot of good ideas for skins with his unique character design.
This is a weekend of work and I think I can call the highpoly done. I'll move into retopo and UV's this week. I tried to make him as close as the reference and the original game model. So far I'm pretty happy with how it looks but is always good to hear comments
The concept is made by Leon Ropeter, pls check out his ArtStation:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/dVmKJ
Replies
I'll do my best to keep updates and finish this guy this month!!!
I've been working on the textures for a while now, There are a few areas that still need to be retouched but I wanted to give you look of how it's evolving. To the left I just used the baked maps and composed them into photoshop and applied some gradient maps. To the right its the hand painted work which improved the color and textures a lot. Still have to paint the tail and a few areas of the feet. I wanted to know what do you think? If you have any tips for hand painted textures I would appreciate it!
I made an overpaint here on things you could improve potentially.
Moving in from a really zoomed out view I would first suggest choosing a focus point, which will be the area where you have the most contrast and most light on the texture. On the linked image by Riot below you can see that the base tahm kench skin has his face kinda "lit" and its brighter than most other areas. So with your texture I would do a similar thing, try and focus light and contrast to the area between the eyes, and around the nose.
In addition to these you can further increase focus by not only brightening the focus area, but blending the non focus area together more both with low contrast, and mixing together the colors a bit ( I probably over did it, fur became too red hehe ) Basically meaning, that the toes should not be as bright as the forehead, instead try and blend them smoothly together with the pants a bit more, further pushing the focus subtly to the forehead area.
Here I wanna mention that how you painted the texture is cool I think, but if you aim to mimic Riot's style, your best bet is to imitate how they make textures. This doesn't mean how you painted yours wouldn't work in another game Riot does this I believe coz their characters are so small on the screen, and you have to recognize them in one glance when they jump it from the bush at you..
when you are satisfied with the focus, I would then suggest bringing out the cool details you put in there with some over emphasized dropshadows, for example on the collar where its overlapping the arm below it, you can add a cool shadow there, or beneath his head, to further separate the forms! also, you could add some mid sized shadows on the fur, so its more "chunky" having flocks of hair together for an easier read on it from further away.
It's a solid work I believe you have great potential! Keep up the good work! and sorry for the sloppy overpaint....
Thanks a lot for the feedback!! You are right the actual state of the model is kind of lacking focus on the face and the paint over you did really gives me an idea of what you mean. I Will play with the contrast an areas of focus more they definitely make a big difference, thanks mate!