Character WIP - Paladin (Cole Eastburn concept) feedback and critiques are welcomed!

RachidJ

Hi guys I've been working on a Paladin character that the awesome Cole Eastburn ( https://www.artstation.com/colehole ) made! I started a few weeks back and now I'll basically be sharing mt progress from the start up until now. It's still a work in progress and I will try my best to post updated versions as soon as possible! Critiques and feedback will be greatly appreciated!

RachidJ

So I started to sculpt the face to get the feel of the character 

RachidJ

at the time with my limited knowledge it I continued to sculpt on it to get it right 

RachidJ

I told myself maybe if I add hair it will all come together 

RachidJ

at this point I had an option to make go for the body and continue on my path or take a step back and see what was wrong, after a while of brainstorming I came to the conclusion that the reason why it sucked ass is because I didn't know anything about the face! With the advice from Marcin Klicki ( https://www.artstation.com/klicek ) and Ryan Kingslien ( https://www.facebook.com/ryan.kingslien/ ) I made the decision to start all over again. So what did I do 1st? Started to do speed sculpts of the skull taking 2h-4h per each. 

RachidJ

RachidJ

once I though I got the skull right I moved on to doing speed sculpts of the face, starting from a sphere each time

RachidJ

at this time I felt comfortable enough to try out the concept once more and ended up with this  

RachidJ

I saw how much I had improved by doing the studies, so till this day I try to do at least one a day. Version 12 being the one I did today.

RachidJ

Now that I was somewhat happy with the head and almost a month had gone by I had to get moving if I wanted to finish this character! Seen that I was falling behind on my schedule I used Brice Laville's ( https://www.artstation.com/bricelavillesaintmartin ) Character female character base mesh to block in the general proportion of the character you can find it here on his gumroad https://gumroad.com/bricelaville. 

RachidJ

After looking at it for a while I noticed that my proportions were not gonna cut it, so I watched a bunch of Blizzard cinematic, the World of Warcraft movie, behind the scenes videos, and come up with something a bit closer  

RachidJ

I continued to work on the block out 

RachidJ

started to add a few details to the folds 

RachidJ

and so I've continued to work on it, this being the latest version, at the moment I'm trying to learn marvelous designer to get better folds, any feed or any information on how to approach cloth, or tutorial that might help me would be greatly appreciated! 

lotet

This looks really cool! 

RachidJ

lotet said:

This looks really cool! 

thank you very much! might bug you once in a while to learn how to do clothing as you do  !

RachidJ

kind of got the hang of Marvelous designer.... well somewhat, not extacly the same folds as in the concept but this is the closest I got it to  . Got to go in now and play around with the shapes to give them a bit more personality. as always any feedback or critique would be greatly appreciated 

fjun

Aah, you beat me to it, I was going to make this next!
Looking really nice so far, I really like the feeling of it.
Some proportional stuff to take note of, the diamond on his pecs seems to be a bit too tiny and higher up and the fur around his neck needs to be a bit puffier! The fur really adds a lot of personality to him, I think. But I'm sure you know all that already.
Going great, will follow this!

RachidJ

thank you for the complements @fjun , I'll try my best to make those changes. Love how your character is coming out! do you have any tips on how to approach the lion love the way it looks on yours. 

fjun

Hah, thanks. Although my little lion is extremely WIP, I need to go over each part and do polishing passes.

Any tips? Hm. My workflow was pretty simple, I used polypaint to draw the big shapes on the plate, masked them out, pushed and pulled and just refined from there.

I think it's very important to make big, simple, gestural and bold statements with your shapes, balancing too little and too much detail, you want to be somewhere in the middle to be in spirit with the Blizzard style. BUT definitely spend a lot of time on the Macro shapes. Very very important.

Here's how I would approach this armor plate thing at first glance,

And then Dynameshing the head and hair together, more polish, remesh project yadayada. Looking forward to more progress!

RachidJ

@fjun this is pure gold! thank you so much for taking your time to lay some knowledge on me. I hope my final product won't disappoint 

RachidJ

slow progress atm, still not happy with the cloth, will be making changes to it, atleast I got the lion blocked out a bit and fixed the gauntlets a bit. 

RachidJ

Managed to work a bit on the Lion (still got a long way to go, specially around the eyes), will be replacing the Battle skirt, and a few more things. Hopefully my next post will be a bit more closer to the finished version.

RachidJ

Managed to do some work on the shoulders and trinket, still need to clean the planes on the lion and fix up the trinket. 

Olingova

Hey! Nice progress so far. I'm a bit late to the party but with every of your speed sculpt there's a recurrent mistake you might need to pay attention to: the forehead is always too small. The eyes should be somewhere around half of the overall height of your head.

RachidJ

thank you for your time and feedback @Olingova , I will keep that in mind on my next speed sculpt. 

fjun

Hey man, nice progress!
Something that jumped out to me on the lion from the front view is the shapes look awkward. You might want to stretch him out a bit horizontally.

The current shapes look rather derpy and awkward. weak even. I sketched out a comparison with a real lion head. I think your hair also attaches too deep which accentuates it.
Might be something you want to look at. The sculpt looks awesome from other views though!

RachidJ

@fjun , thank you for pointing that out I'll see what changes I can make tomorrow, I came back to the post too late in the day to notice  .  

RachidJ

Changed the battle skirt, cleaned up the shoulders, and added a bit of asymmetry to the gauntlets before adding any ornaments to it to see how it looked. Still haven't decided, will revisit it tomorrow with fresh eyes.

lotet

Looking good

how close do you want to match the concept by the way? because I see some things here and their that could be tweaked to match more, but then again, that might not be your exact goal :P

jose.fuentes

this is a solid model! great work.

On your speed sculpts, one thing that stands out to me is how the lower jaw and neck connect, seems like theres too much neck and not enough jaw

RachidJ

@lotet thanks you for the complement and thank you for asking, I realized now that I did not state that from the start. To answer your question, I am trying to match the personality that I think the concept resembles rather than a 3D copy, although staying close to the concept as close as possible but taking a few liberties with the overall silhouette. For example, I know that the head extrudes higher in the concept giving it a more triangular feel to the silhouette, but I want a more squarish and rounder feel to the character that's why I decided to bring down the head and pull out the the breastplate collar out more so that he may have room to move his head around. Hope that answers your question . But please feel free to give any type of feedback that you may have, if it will improve the overall quality of my character I will surely add it! 

RachidJ

@jose.fuentes Thank you for the complement, I will use it as fuel for when I have to pull an all nighter on this guy  ! I will definetly keep your feedback in mind on my next speed sculpt.  

RachidJ

I changed the proportion on the lion (I will be posting close ups tomorrow of it, could not today due to time restrictions), did a few minor tweaks to the cape, increases the size of the belt ornaments to give it more readability, added ornaments to the gauntlets, played around with the belt and placed in a belt buckle to see how it looked.

polygons

Coming along nicely

RachidJ

@polygons Thank you 

RachidJ

updated a few things here and there and finalized a few meshes 

tried to improvise and see what I could come up for the book, for now is gonna have to stay as it is due to me running behind on my deadline.

RachidJ

getting close to calling the high poly version done, starting on the low poly, shooting for 50k, I may be able to lower it more or the total opposite and end up with way more than I ever expected XD. 

RachidJ

Been getting some of the retopo done, will be tweaking the high poly when I get bored of the low poly. (This is not the final version for each part of the low poly I will be optimizing it once I have everything blocked out in the retopo)

RachidJ

made some progress on the retopo today, now that all has been blocked in, I will e optimizing the topology 

RachidJ

Uvs are set and mostly all bake errors have been fixed, finally time for some texturing! Both terrified and excited about the texturing process, hopefully it doesn't make the character look like poop 

lotet

Looks really nice!
looking forward to see the textures

dGreenberg

Hey @RachidJ, the Paladin is coming along great!

Your recent baked version is looking clean, and that silhouette is staying strong. Best of luck jumping in on the textures and looking forward to seeing his updates

RachidJ

@lotet , thank you for the complement and I apologize if my answer in the previous reply may have been rude in any way, I am very new to posting on forums and still don't know how to properly express myself thru text, but with practice I hope I will improve

RachidJ

@dGreenberg , thank you very much for the kind words I will try my best to do a good job with the texturing, hopefully it comes out as awesome as yours. If you have any advice or tutorial you would like to share that could help me out, I would be very much interested in it, love your "Next" character!

RachidJ

Trying get a decent gray scale before I start putting textures on top.

RachidJ

Massive set back since I last posted, I decided to go back to the high poly and do some minor tweaks here and there to give it some edge wear, then I redid the UVs to maximize on my space to get rid of the damn pixelation and then basically everything that could of gone wrong with the character went  . Managed to get back after a few days of trouble shooting and crying myself to sleep. I guess it all paid off now since I got a gray scale that I'm happy with. So here is the start of the block in of the colors for the character (no material information has been added yet this is just a color block out). 

RachidJ

Managed to block in the colors and added a bit of material information just for fun (this by no means will be the materials that it will carry, it will be worked on allot more). Now is when the fun starts. 

lotet

nice, shame you had to redo a bunch of stuff
 
I think his shoulders could be a bit wider and the head a bit larger maybe, but its minor nitpicks and nothing hard to change on the low poly directly if you wanna go for it.

other then that I think it looks pretty good as a base, id try dulling down the gold a bit, its really taking focus from the face at the moment, other then that its looking good!

RachidJ

@lotet , thanks for the feed back and sorry for the late reply. i'll give it a go and see how it looks.

RachidJ

Managed to work a bit on the bigger shapes today, still got to tweak a few materials. The hands, face and hair are the same as last post I will be working on them tomorrow.