[WIP] Stylized Characters and Weapon

Mr_Nova

Hey everyone! I started this project back in April but have slowly been making progress on my own while going to school (so extra character design and Illustration work.) I'm posting this as a walkthrough for my process and any feedback that could be given (I would highly appreciate it, always striving to be better.)

I will post what I have currently in progress and will slowly be adding more until the project as a whole is finished. 
The general idea for this was a tag team duo "BBot and Kitter" (names may change) "BBot" is a standard heavy armored Mecha and "Kitter" is a hyper intelligent cat who is addicted to coffee and uses a large rocket launcher as a weapon.

1.) Concepts: BBot (concept by Eden West- https://www.artstation.com/eden-west )


Concept: Kitter's Rocket Launcher (Concept by: Dylan Scher- https://www.artstation.com/dscher  )


2.) High Poly Models





BBot High Poly:




3.) Low Poly (Shrinkwrap, In progress): 




Let me know what you think! I will update when I make more progress.

Mr_Nova

*Update 2: Lowpoly Finished (starting UV's unwrapping.)




High poly: 1.777,076 Tri's
Low poly: 20,403 Tri's

UV's will soon be unwrapped and then will be brought into Substance Painter to be baked (same process for the characters when I get around to it.)

Mr_Nova

**Update 3 - Wow, I have not updated this in a while but I have not stopped working on this. I began baking the low poly version in Substance Painter and have slowly been chipping away at texturing while juggling school and my internship. The mesh encountered some baking errors which took some back and forth fixing; Some normal map artifacts still which I will be painting out in Photoshop. 

The entire weapon shares one texture map (2048x2048) that I split into 3 sections for ease of access, so the entire map is not shown in my screenshots but it is tightly packed and clean very pleased with that.




Lot of work to go and plenty of touch ups still but I'm trying to match the stylized look of the original concept (shown above). Any feedback will be greatly appreciated

Mr_Nova

**Final Update (for the Weapon I suppose) - Well after a long year of learning and suffering (in all sense of the word) to make this weapon it's finally finished. Considering I juggled school and an internship I'd say it's an accomplishment to some extent, I hope I did the original concept by Dylan Scher (can be seen above in my first post) some justice. Anyways, everything was modeled in Blender, damages were sculpted in Zbrush, Textured in Substance Painter and finally rendered inside Marmost Toolbag 3 (first time using that software, I love it). Hopefully some will find it cool,  Have a good day everyone. 

PolyHertz

I like the rocket launcher, gives me Ratchet & Clank vibes.

There are definitely some issues though. The large black barrel is over-optimized, it needs at least double the number of segments to round it out without getting distortion on the normals from the holes that're punctured into it. The handle grip topology is under-optimized, and the circle with the blue ring above it is WAAAY too dense given the rest of the model. If you want to show off the wires in your portfolio (as opposed to just the shaded model) I'd honestly recommend just completely redoing the lowpoly model from scratch.