Tech Athena - feedback welcome at all stages
polycounter lvl 6
I found this cool concept by dylancl and decided I would like to try out my armor modelling skills.
I've been playing a lot of Hades and I'm enjoying the afro-coded athena. There are a few other features I want to incorporate, we'll be playing around with a new spear and a real helmet, no idea if that'll play out or if I should just stick with the helmetless version.
more concept art coming
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You can see some my my helmet concepts on the right, and the hair/body will resemble the lady on the left who is instagrammer Natt Nyah. Armor and fabric will resemble the original concept piece with the exception of the wrists, which will resemble the Hades art. The style will be handpainted.
I stress that feedback is welcome as I'm still very new at 3D art.
getting started with a basemesh made in makehuman. right of the bat I can tell that I'm going to have to play with the forehead, hips, butt, and cheeks. I'll post here when that's done.
Fixed up the basemesh a bit. Will probably work a little bit more but no need to post here every 30 seconds. Still can't quite get the lips to look right.
here's the hair. I'm not sure I got the volumes right. See my example:
is there anything I can do to make this better?
Do you think the volumes of the hair look alright? I've messed with it a bit since last pic:
don't mind the armor, still blocking it in
Here's a zoomed in look at the lips. If you could redline or be very specific about what I should do it would be much appreciated.
Eye size is intended. Not sure what to do about the legs but I'll fix that when it comes to posing.
Here's an update on the current art (it's just flat colors to help my brain think about how it'll look when textured)
best help i can give you is to tell you, try to stick to maya/max/blender whatever modeling program you are using, and block out the WHOLE model there till you nail everything perfectly like in the concept. than go to zbrush and define it. because changing silhouettes & shapes etc. if your model has millions of polys already is very hard and takes forever!
as an example, here is my entry for the last artstation challenge, last year. if you scroll all the way down you can see how long i stayed in the blockout stage until i figured everything out: https://www.artstation.com/contests/grand-space-opera-light-age/challenges/96/submissions/59766
i hope this helps
building out the silhouette. As you can see the edges of the fabric don't exactly match the concept, but this is alright - I made sure to add extra volume which I will remove using alpha.
Also i block a lot and can't see (or becomes a big headache to do the work around to see images hosted elsewhere.) IF you could use the polycount image hoster instead you might get more c&c, especially if others are in the same boat..
don't mind the eyes and face, that'll get fixed up soon with textures.
Also, I am using an IMM curve brush, one of my own devising, it's basically a tube with a tapering end and an interesting root.
been working on the textures a fair bit. Still going to need to do a lot of work obviously, but I'll get there. This is all handpainted with baked lighting, there's no pbr reflections or anything
closeup of her face after I added the dodge and blush layers
Progress at the end of the day. Note the panel lines in the skintight clothes. I'll be working on the hair next.
A good search on artstation / pinterest might show some promising guides and or tutorials that will help if the wiki doesn't already have the "most useful ones", linked up for easy access already. Cool stuff, good to see some more hand painted stuff, hope it turns out well.
Here is one guide that i saw recently trying to sort out the pc/desktop/folder mess:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/AmvJm LAST IMAGE as a general idea.
There maybe more useful stuff in the polycount wiki, i can't see it so idk.
Good luck will be looking at this from time to time, don't know if i'll contribute more though. Just take your time and make sure its the best you can do.
I'll look at these, thanks!
Where we stand right now - I think the next steps are to fix up the back and to add panel lines for the leg armor.
Back is just about done! I'm going to start working on rigging now. Once it's rigged it'll get the shield, spear, and boots.
Well, boys, this is likely the final version of this character! Hope y'all enjoyed my character creation journey here! Hopefully I'll be making a new one soon so enjoy! Last chance for any feedback before I upload to sketchfab!
there are a couple of things that i would change, if you still wanna work on it.
first of all i would give her shoes, or if not, flatten her feet so she does not just stand on her toes.
2nd i would try to nail the pose of the concept, that one looks bad ass, but if you wanna keep this rather cute pose, i would just reposition her feet a bit because it looks like she is about to fall over the way she stands now.
texture wise i would say the cloth and the metal do not fit with the style they are done int... the cloth is super flat but the the metal has shading, i would make the cloth the way you made the metal.
also the hair just bleed together into one black spot, if you have the time and motivation i would still spend some hours on that as well.
thats my 5 cent^^
And thanks for the feedback!
As promised, here's the pose more resembling the concept. I think I'm going to make a sketchfab version and call it here.
as promised, here's the sketchfab. Do you guys like the shiny metal more? If not, no big deal, I'll just hold off of it in the future lol
My only suggestion for future projects is to gather some inspirations also for materials - it will save a lot of trouble when it comes to selecting texture style and the end result will be more consistent