black ops dude

rooster

I worked for a company last summer hols and I was working on this when I left. They got in touch saying theyd like to use it if I touch it up a little, so im working on it now. Pretty much done with the modeling side of things, im mainly looking for texture critiques but I'd still be interested to hear other crits for future reference.
its pretty much spot on the target polycount at 2503 polies
cheers!

smooth: (few issues with the groups here Ive since fixed.)

wire:

texture wip:

rooster

small update, more blue:

steady

dang rooster that looks great, you have really improved a whole lot since the new boards.
my thoughts are: the blue right now makes him look like he is wearing denim all over, might wanna revert back to black.
i dont think that those two circle indentations on his chest armor add much, and i think his belt buckle looks a bit weird, but other than that this looks like a fun meat bag to shoot the crap out of.
keep up the good work buddy

lkraan

Looks great!
I would see if there are some polys to be saved somewhere to model the pockets on the side of his legs. Maybe take some polys from the goggles? Looks very dense there as far as I can see from the wireframe render.

The skins is coming along very nice. One thing that I noticed is that it looks like his pants are riding up his ass really bad

MikeF

Looks good, but i think a few more poly's could go into the fingers (not meaning you should individually model each one if you dont want to, but just round out the chunks a bit) Also his shoulders seemed kind of weighed down, its almost like the shoulders start on the upper torso just fine, but then when you get to the upper arm just where the shoulder should be ending, its dropped down a few centimeters.

Hope that makes sense.

rooster

thanks for all the comments, and sorry bout the late reply. So much different stuff needing attention its taken me a while to get round to doing more work on him. About the denim- yeah I agree, but instead of desaturating it I made it darker and I think it works ok now. In fact I made the whole thing darker- well he is a member of black ops

MoP

Cool stuff Rooster, 256 textures are fun
I think MikeF is right about the arms, the shoulder positioning does look slightly odd to me, also the pose you modelled the arms in is a fairly unusual one, so that might have something to do with it. Not a huge problem though, nobody would really notice if you rigged and posed him, I reckon.
You could maybe take some polys out of the helmet, and maybe the goggles - they look really dense mesh-wise, compared to the rest of the model. Not really a big problem though.

The textures are turning out really well, you've got a lot of detail for a 256. Be careful with the cloth, it's looking a bit "muddy" in places, particularly just below the belt, where it gets darker all the way round for no apparent reason.

If you wanted to make this a really ass-kicking piece, you could just go over the whole texture with a 1-pixel Pencil tool in paintbrush, just picking out highlights and defining material boundaries really sharply.
I did a quick paintover on 2 areas I thought would benefit from this the most:



Those vents on the lower leg look a little too "painted" at the moment, if you know what i mean - just go really sharp there and define each line of the vent to the same degree, and I think that will make it look just that bit more believable.
Likewise the upper body armour, just going around really defining highlights on edges (nothing too extreme, just sharpening everything up), will go a long way to making him seem more real and solid.
Take a look at Bobo's "Bunker" texture on his site, if you haven't seen it - a perfect example of using individual pixels to really add a whole new level of sharpness and detail.

One final note - you're getting a little of a cartoony effect that I think this texture would be better off without... stuff like the strong black outlines around the pockets and vents are fairly unrealistic - keep the ones where the material would be in shadow, but on upwards-facing areas, lighten those up a little so they look less like you're drawing a black outline, and more like it's light hitting a material surface. Try using really dark blues in the thin material seam lines, instead of black - it'll probably look more believable that way.

Great work so far though, I like it. Keep it up!

MoP

PS. Where were you at last summer? I was down in the Tech Park at Visual Science. I know they had another student working there but he was on a different project - was that you?

rooster

thanks MoP! great crit, really useful. Ill try tweaking shoulder position as mentioned, and see if it looks better. I've never noticed it as a problem but I'll definately check it out, maybe overlay some photo ref too. I think youre dead on about the black lines and the touchups also. I used to just be a skinner, but now I spend most of my time on models rather than texture I think ive gotten a bit out of touch with it (not that I was any good to begin with ).

The company was mere-mortals down in newcastle, I didnt go to Tech Park. Actually I've never heard of it, was it good?

MoP

Heh, I'm from Newcastle, near enough... Nah the Technology Park is on the way out of Dundee to the West, Visual Sciences are based there, I was working on Carmageddon TV for the PS2... can you say what you were doing?

rooster

cant talk about what that models for, but I was mainly working on something else, I did about 65% of the art for 'Junior Board Games' A pretty simple translation of some boardgames onto ps2. I think I had more fun working on it than anyone is likely to have playing it
I hope some kid somewhere manages to enjoy it at least..

heres a link to a review, some screens at the lower right, check out the panning it got!
edit: d'oh heres the link
http://www.ic-games.co.uk/index.php?location=1&articleid=2335
I did levels for Bath Battleships, Garden Dice, and Dominoes (but not the actual domino pieces..). I also did in the title screen the train, 'engrave-a-draw', robot, duck and the poster at the back with the chopped off head

MoP

Heh, cool. It looks pretty good (better than many games of this type out there!)... although if you see them, personally bitch-slap whoever spelled "Category" in the Garden Dice scoring screen...

poopinmymouth

The texture is looking pretty cool and gritty. I think the model needs to be brought up to match. He is kind of looking like a balloon man. Give him some stance and some rigidity. Also those shadows are looking a lot like lines on his pants. Smoth them out a bit.