Dragon Quest Cloud Strife
polycounter lvl 7
Loved the new FF7RM and I wanted to do some fanart of Cloud, but knew I wanted to put a spin on it in some sort of stylized way. While brainstorming I remembered I wanted to do some Dragon Quest fanart as well after finishing DQXI a while back so why not combine the two?
My goal is to replicate the DQ style as closely as possible, from the texture style to proportions and anatomy. I'm referencing Erik from DQXI a lot since he has the spiky hair and standard figure. To get the outline effect I'll most likely be doing the old reverse shell technique so I can have a higher degree of control over it. Still have a lot to do but I'm pretty happy with where it's going so far. The hair still needs work, especially the back. Pants could probably stand to be a bit more poofy as well, and creases and wrinkles need refining.
Any C&C appreciated, thanks for looking!
My goal is to replicate the DQ style as closely as possible, from the texture style to proportions and anatomy. I'm referencing Erik from DQXI a lot since he has the spiky hair and standard figure. To get the outline effect I'll most likely be doing the old reverse shell technique so I can have a higher degree of control over it. Still have a lot to do but I'm pretty happy with where it's going so far. The hair still needs work, especially the back. Pants could probably stand to be a bit more poofy as well, and creases and wrinkles need refining.
Any C&C appreciated, thanks for looking!
Replies
As always any C&C appreciated, thanks for looking.
Corner of the mouths need to be poked in towards the back of the head.
Good start
Got some more feedback and refined the hair and face a bit. Threw on a reverse shell to see how it'd look with an outline, but I just remembered I could've just used the Outline feature under Materials but oh well. Stickin with 2 for now. Going to throw some colors on the whole model and tweak a few things here and there but I think I'm ready to start retopo soon.
Forgot to mention Cloud is sitting at 57467 tris, and the buster sword at 2,684 tris.
The biggest challenge were the metal pieces, specifically his pauldron and sword. In Dragon Quest XI, there is pretty much no edge wear at all on all the metal pieces and clothing. Even entire suits of armor have a uniform metal texture with no edge wear or scratches for the style. Having his pauldron and sword have that sort of uniformity looked really weird though, given the character's history. Having a uniform texture also made some of the details on his buster sword pretty hard to read as well, so I ended up having a small amount of edge wear.
In the future I would also implement the stitching differently; most likely not through the hi-poly sculpt but in Substance. I was originally going to have 3 separate textures for the hair (1024), head (1024) and body (2048), but ended up splitting the body into 2 2048 textures when I discovered the resolution wasn't good enough to capture the stitching details that well. I feel like creating the stitches in Substance would be a lot easier rather than trying to make sure the bake and resolution captures enough detail.
I am pretty happy with how the hair turned out though. I had a pretty general idea of how I wanted to approach it, but wasn't sure how it'd actually look once I tried it. I laid out all the hair UVs completely straight, then created a repeating normal map of ridges in the hair. This was done simply by just adding lines on a plane then raising every other line to create ridges. Then I creased it all in Zbrush and meshed with the Crease level to get the desired effect. In Photoshop, I messed around with the opacity and toned down the normal a bit. For the albedo, I just used the normal and turned it Black & White, messed around with the Hue/Saturation for the hair color, then tiled it a bit more for tighter strands. Pretty happy with the results!
Going to start rigging and painting weights, then setting up presentation. I will mostly make some sort of platform for him; thinking about something that'd give off the vibe of a mako factory or Shinra headquarters. Almost done! Thanks for looking!
Thanks for looking!