Cartoony Ogres

Recursive Sweatpants

A while back, I took a class on ZBrush and sculpted these two characters from artwork by Danny Beck:



A few classes later, I decided I wanted to do technical art for games, and to practice, I turned these sculpts into game-ready characters and rendered them in UE4:



I want to put this on my portfolio, but I feel like it's not quite there yet. Final polish on projects like these is something I haven't gotten a lot of practice with, so I would like to ask for feedback on ways I can improve this render and make it more faithful to the original artwork.

Skinner3D

I feel like they are too smooth, and the final render is definitely too smooth. I think the materials need to be pushed more. I would also add at least a second layer of color/texture to every surface. Needs something to break up the single color and convey more of what each material is. The club is nice. You could shoot for that level of detail across the models. I think the little one doesn't have enough model detail. He looks like a cut scrapper and your muscle tone is more like a younger version.
The hair/fur is weirdly patchy and not very striking. I almost prefer the non colored version to the final render.
More lights and use of some of the diffuse lights in whatever program you are using would help. The light/shadow isn't highlighting much at all.
Finally one thing I learned the long way was that eyes can never be a flat color. They have to have gradient at least like in the reference. This can be done by a texture image or a gradient map or glow or post fx.
Dont be afraid to push it past what the artwork shows. Being able to recreate it like this is important, but I feel that if you can make your characters feel like they do in the artwork, you win even better.
They do look good overall.

RachidJ

Hi @Recursive Sweatpants , I would like to say that the models came out nicely done. In my opinion an easy way to stay more faithful to the original concept is by trying to keep the silhouette of the characters over all ( even though that may prove hard due to the challenges you may face replicating the pose on the concept). one way I try to stay close to it is by using the head as a measuring tool. By taking your render and the concept and measuring with the heads, I can see that if you bring up the trapezoids and neck about half a head upwards you may get a closer to the silhouette in the concept. If you are trying to go stylized with this project I would say to study how Blizzard and other companies like it approach hair,fur,cloth and so on. Regarding the lighting of the scene I could recommend watching the lighting academy videos for unreal by 51Deadalus https://www.youtube.com/user/51Daedalus/videos , granted they are long but will help allot. I hope this helps   

Recursive Sweatpants

Thank you guys for your feedback! I went and did a second pass for their textures; I exaggerated their muscle definition in the ZBrush sculpts to make it pop a little more in the normal map, I added some variation in the color and height map for their skin, and I added and tweaked various things here and there. I also enlarged the traps on the big ogre and raised his head up a little. One thing I discovered that I think is a huge improvement is that the ears on the models were too small on both characters; I scaled them up and I think it looks a lot better:

I still need to improve the fur on the big one's arms and go through those lighting tutorials, but I feel that these guys are already looking a ton better thanks to you!

Recursive Sweatpants

And after making a few more tweaks, here is the final render! There are still a few things I could improve on but I've been working on this on and off for so long now that I feel it might be better just to move on at this point. I also made a few basic breakdowns to show off the topology on everyone a bit.