WIP: Demon. Please spare a minute. [Mild Nudity]

Slash

Hello all! This is my first post on the new boards. Im currently working on this demon, who is supposed to be the main character of a mod in progress. I want it to deform correctly, and i also want the face to be ideal for facial animation.(Hl2 style) But since i don`t have much (if any) experience in rigging and animating, i would love for you to give me pointers on where i need extra polies, where i could get away with less, and so forth. Crits on polygon flow and pretty much anything is appreciated.

It weighs about 3000 polies as it is now, and i plan to end up around 5-7 for the final model. (Its for the source engine.)






The lower legs have too many polies, i know.. the feet is far from done. Im having trouble with the knees, advise on that particular area would be great. Feel free to do paintovers.

(You might ask where the nudity is.. He doesnt have any clothes. And i used it to get your attention and lure you into this thread.)

thinsoldier

It looks great to me.

I don't think you need all those poly's around the tip of the tail and the lower legs tho. I see a lot of stuff on these boards looking just a good with much less polys in those areas.

And unless the source engine is different from most other engines I've read up on, the model will have to be triangulated before it can go in-game. So imaging taking all your quads and splitting them in 2. So technically you have about 6000 polys if you triangulate it.

I'm sure if you were mesh smoothing this into a high poly character, those quads would come in really handy to make it look really good. but since it's for a game, now that you've got the basic shape in place, maybe you shold start switching over to actully working with 3sided polys.

But I might be totally totally wrong cuz I'm really just a n00b.

Oh and I really like your edge loops, I doubt you'll have any problems when animating.

monster

Yeah it looks like it will deform well enough. thinsoldier is right about having too many polies in the tail and lower legs.

Although I wouldn't triangulate it, just as long as you know what the final triangle count will be.

FatAssasin

The proportions and everything look good, but there's way too many polys. You could easily get it down to 2000 without losing anything important. Remember, don't model anything you can add in a texture later, like the base of the thumb nail. And if an edge doesn't change direction noticably, get rid of it.

Sparky

Slash! I know you. You work for Fist of Fate, Genocide's Renegade mod. Excellent work from the lot of you, and I hope you'll stay with them to show what you've got.

That dragon you made, is it for the Unadahm army?

Slash

Thanks for the replies guys! I am aware of the tip of his tail, and the lower legs.. they will be the first things i fix. I don`t really know about game engines and triangulation, but if i convert it to editable mesh it should be all tris. It has worked in the past. (oh, and I AM counting the tris. 3166. The polycount is 1616. I guess im confusing more than myself when i refer to both tris and four-or-more-sided polygons as "polies". )

Sparky: Sorry, wrong Slash! (Imposter? :O) Thats kind of funny.. I DID actually work with genocide some time ago.(I think it was for some warhammer4k mod for wc3 that died out as soon as rumours about dawn of war started surfacing. but dont quote me on that.)I am not, however, working with him now. But this new project of his looks promising. Maybe i`ll pop by and lend a foot?

//edit: I had myself a laugh when i saw the emoticon i used. -> <- It is a tad over-enthusiastic, i was aiming more for something like this:

Slash

OHK! Im back with some updates. Removed a lot of useless polygons, added a finger, and started defining the clavicle.





Thoughts?

Slash

added the rest of the fingers. Im not sure i like them, they look kind of wrong, but i cant put my finger on it.. (no pun intended.) Maybe they are too fat?



Started the feet, these, definitely dont like. they looked cool in the concept, but now they look more like oversized bird feet. suggestions?

thinsoldier

I have a question about your tail. It curves so pervectly and is so smooth. Did you extrude along a curve or do u just have a lot of patience?

Slash

Heh, patience and a lovely feature called SOFT SELECTION

Slash

Started the head. Tried some new methods, but i ended up redoing everything the way i know how to... 10% effectivity.



Its still messy, something caused by the methods i used for creating it, but it looks alot better than it did 2 hours ago...

Slash

GEttin there.. My current headache is the mouth.. As i mentioned earlier, I have little or no experience in animation, let alone rigging and that stuff.. i want the face to be very animateable,(word?) and the mouth is supposed to open up pretty far. Any advice would be most appreciated!

Slash

Here`s one of the concepts - just so you`ll get a feel on how he`s supposed to turn out. Here you can see that he grins, and his lips is pretty far up under the nose. this is one of the facial animations i want to achieve. (The mandible horn idea was added later..)

Slash

Wow.. such an overwhelming interest. I`m flattered! :P

Well, I`ll take it as a sign that im doing everything right, since noone crits. But im blaming you all if the foundations i build now fuck things up later on in the process! ...

Got to work on that mouth. His lower jaw is quite massive, and it looks abit more orkish than the concepts. But i think i like it this way. Any comments on that? I havent really done mouths that are supposed to be animated before, let alone open mouths at all..

I also started on the ear.. These always pose problems for me... I never get them "right", and they are insanely hard to unwrap. On this one i`ll add all the inner ear detail with zbrush. (Did i mention that this bitch will be gloriously zbrushed for normal map generation?)

Here it is:




Oh, and in case noone noticed, i added his horns

//edit: Each of the halves are about 850 tris, sans the eyes. Those are just placeholders anyways!

Slash

Here are a few shots of the head and the body together:

Slash

Its pushing five thousand tris now. As soon as i connect the head to the body and fix those damn feet it will probably end up on about 5500, and i have a few k to play around with accessories. (I have decided not to go over 7k. By much anyways...)

Laheen

It looks good ^_^, though his feet look really large, like there tiger shoes or somthing, his head looks a tad small as well but maybe when you connect it to the body it wont.. hmm anyway good prgress so far.

CheapAlert

[ QUOTE ]
(You might ask where the nudity is.. He doesnt have any clothes. And i used it to get your attention and lure you into this thread.)

[/ QUOTE ]

You bitch

Considering a castrated being, that's not needed anyway, unless the crotch will protrude a bit or skinned cleverly like this, or used as testes, like this

:P

<Cheapy[L]> gah damn you slash and your false nudity warning
<Cheapy[L]> i was hoping for some nice sweaty demon cock

Slash

I actually plan to give him a nice sweaty demon cock. It kind of fits with the story. The start of the story anyways.. then i`ll have to get crackin on some concepts for clothes. We can`t have a naked demon running around all of the time, can we?

Slash

The [HEAJ] storm has blown over. It is once again safe to stick ones head out without drowning!

I have connected his head to his body. The neck is still a goddamn mess, but atleast he`S got one. I`ll fix that later.



I also "fixed" his knees, I think these might do the trick. They look like knees, and im guessing that they will deform correctly. Defined his claw toes a bit more, and rearranged some lines and polies. IMO they look better now.



4944 polies.

Echelon-IV

niiiiiice!! I must say I like it!

thinsoldier

what software are u modeling in that has this soft selection?
... and I dunno why, but the face kinda reminds me of jeepers creepers.

Slash

thinsoldier: Its max 7

I found the time to work on this baby again. It ended up on about 4800 polies.



First of all, i battled my fear of uvw unwrap, and i dont think it looks that bad. But then again, im a unwrap n00b.



Then i imported the fucker to zbrush, and im doing the highpoly there. I tried to generate some wip normal maps there, and it kinda worked.



Here's where im at on the highpoly:



One more image for those happy 56k'ers:

Here i put the wip normal map and a wip texture into doom3 as a static object. im getting lots of black polygons scattered all over the model. Some parts are darker than others for no apparent reason. Any light anyone might be able to shed on this matter would be greatly appreciated!

After the normal map is done I'll dive headfirst into the world of RIGGING, POSING and ANIMATING. that should be fun.

//edit: if there's any interest i would be happy to release an SDK. I just need a host for the file.

EarthQuake

if you're gonna put it in doom3 you should render your normals map with d3's render bump. Most programs do normals a little differently and its best to use the one thats actually meant for the game or you will probably get errors.

vahl

What EQ said.
Even in Max, the normal seems to have some problems (very black areas).
also try to make the lowpoly model smaller for the ingame test, this may be a lighting issue, but I doubt...

for more info in rendering normal maps with doom3 (also works with ase files but needs some text-editing :

http://wip.global-illusions.com/d3tut/quick%20Tutorial%20-%20Doom3_PPM.htm

PM me if you need more help btw

vahl

Oh something else I just noticed (not editing as it's a different point), for doom3 you can mirror uvs, which will give you more uv space and maybe prevent the black half problem.
there's some wasted space aswell, certainely due to the unmirrored stuff.

hobodactyl

I would recommend adding more detail with the high poly version. For example, the edge where the horns go into the head should be a bit sharper; to me it looks sort of like it's been blasted with a sander. Try going a little more extreme with some of the edges.

The mouth and the eyes also don't look like the concept art that you showed. His face is much more angular in the concept art, and it looks like it's really smoothed down in the model, so that's another thing to consider. It looks much more like Willem Dafoe than the concept's face:


I think if you follow the concept more closely this could be a really great model.

Rick Stirling

A quicky - did you get yourself a set square and a spirit level for your birthday? So many of those edges are perfectly 90 degrees - don't be afraid of curves.

Slash

But curves are SCARY!! Its been a while since i modeled this, and the methods i used back then was less than perfect. So the end result is also less than perfect. If i can change it without ruining the uv's, please give me specific tips on alternate flows. (Paintovers would be great!)

Thanks alot everyone who critted. (Rick: notice how i said "alot". ) I've experimented further, and i've made some progress. I found out that i needed to turn off the "smooth uvs" when i generate the normal map in zbrush. This yielded a result much more similar to doom3 normal maps, both in appearance and the way it acted. here`s some ingame shots:




//edit: in those shots i also threw in a crude specular map, to keep the model from looking too boring.

poopinmymouth

Still looks like he has some weird shading errors going on in the normal map. Also is this just a flat color texture, or is it the final texture? If it's the final, it needs a lot more color variation and some type of varying interest points.

Normal map came out kind of cool, and the definition is interesting in parts. I hope you finish him up with a proper color/spec/normal, and rig him, so we can see some cool in game shots.