Naruto Konoha Shinobi

jec1183

Hello everyone,

I think this might actually be my first post on these boards. Hard to keep track with so many different ones. Anyways, I was bored one day and decided to start modeling a Konoha Shinobi for fun. Right now the character is completely modeled and unwrapped. I am currently in the process of rigging and will then be moving on to texturing. Trust me I know there is a lot of wasted space in the texture sheets so don't get on me about that one lol.

Just checked its my third post

Rick Stirling

Squares in characters are bad.



Squares are hard, 90 degree angles, found in machines and architecture. The body is soft, bend, it stretchs and contracts. The muscles flow into one another.




Burn your ruler! Bin that 90 degree angle! Love the S curve!

Oh, and there are way too many polygons in the hands compared to the rest of the model, and the UVs are wasting quite a lot of space.

There are also a lot of seams in the uv mapping, and seams are bad. Each broken point in the UV map means 2 verts in the model. The game has to calculate every vert to render a polygon, unless it has already figured out where that vert is. When you make a uv seam it means that usually it physically breaks the model, and makes 2 verts in the EXACT same place, but it then sees two verts, not one. The number of polygons doesn't matter as much as the number of vertices.

jec1183

Thanks for the crit, however I feel the need to point out the fact that I already knew about the uvws and even typed in at the top that I didn't need comments on it. Always seems funny that no one really takes the time to read all of what someone says on boards. I will look into changing up the way the polys flow. Also most of the boxes you commented on are all in the flak jacket of the character. If I were to take it off the body does flow as you suggested it should. The hands are heavy on the polys but I wanted them that way. I was looking to stay in the 5000-7000 poly range for the character along with all the props.

Rick Stirling

Always feels funny that folk ask for crits on artwork and make excuses at the ones given. Don't make me deal out the Jan Michael Vincent justice on ya.

You models squareness isn't mostly on the jacket, it's mostly on the entire model. the number of 90 degree angles on that sucker is into the thousands.

Here is the golden rule:

MAKE EVERY VERT COUNT

For each 90 degree angle and edgeloop, have a hard look at it. Can it be tilted? Can the ntire loop follow a nice curve?

The human body is almost all S curves.

The inside of the elbows will collapse harsly on deformatio - the approach you used on the outside of the elbows is much better

You face UV isn't pretty. A side on projection only? try a stitched up cube map.

almighty_gir

im curious as to where all the detail is for such a high facecount... you could easily cut that count in half without losing any noticable details!

Rick Stirling

Well, there are easily over 1000 polygons in the hands. You may not think so, but I was looking at my poly counts today and had 800ish with less detail.

Thats almost 1/5 of the models poly budget in 1/50 of the volume - areas that arent that noticible in game. There are more polygons in the hands than in an entire quake 2 character.

MoP

Listen to Rick, he knows what he's about. He's right on the money about 90 degree angles - keep things smooth and curving for more natural looking character models.

As for the UVW's, I don't think there's any problem with the layout you have there. Rick's right about the vertex count and seams thing, but I wouldn't worry about it too much here.

I second almighty_gir's question - there are almost 6000 tris in that model, and it looks like a 3000-triangle model in silhouette and detail.

nitzmoff

Everyone's already commented on the over-density of the model, but I'll add I've never seen a model that sports a full set of fingers, alpha mapped hair and such, but lacking a real nose and mouth. Why scrimp and save on the focal point the poor guy?

Justin Meisse

[ QUOTE ]
Everyone's already commented on the over-density of the model, but I'll add I've never seen a model that sports a full set of fingers, alpha mapped hair and such, but lacking a real nose and mouth. Why scrimp and save on the focal point the poor guy?

[/ QUOTE ]

Probably because he's wearing a ninja mask

jec1183

There are about 2200 tris in the hands, yes its bad policy I admit but I want them to deform well. Based on everyones crits I will however remodel the hands. Without the hands yes it is about 3,500 tris so including another set of hands will greatly reduce the over all tri count. As for the face the mouth and nose are covered so there is no real point in modeling them. The face map isn't from the side, it just looks that way. I used pelt map to flatten it out in sections and just stitched it together. Hopefully I will have the time to change and use all of your advice tomorrow if not you will see an update on saturday or sunday.

jec1183

Thanks for everyones crits. As suggested I went back and reworked the hands. The old poly count for one hand was at 1,038 tris which ofcourse was horrible. I reworked it and was able to get the new hand down below half and the tri count on one hand now rests at 422 tris. The old character's whole poly count was 5908 and now that sits at 4,676 tris. I will unwrap the hands and then rework the uvws as suggested and then post a image update.

jec1183

Here are screenshots of the new hands and polycount.

Zeldrik

With the face when it comes to texturing you will want a more frontal map and perhaps atleast the main features to not be mirrored. If you look at other models you will notice a lot of people have both sides for at least the front section of the face and mirror the side of the head.

the new polycount for the hands is better but i dont think you are still using all the faces as well as you could be, maybe because the pose looks unnatural..even if you plan on posing them after rigging i suggest you make them more relaxed. Look at your own hands especially the thumb area, at the moment yours looks like a pankcake which will deform badly when he has to hold something.

Anyway it might seem like there are a lot of crits and people are tearing your art apart but it just means people see potential in your stuff and like what you're doing...think of a crit as a compliment heh.

peace out (why is everyone saying that lately?)

Daz

Along with the crits Ricks provided, I think a big problem here is you're perhaps overly obsessed with trying to keep your model pretty much all quads, and your efficiency is suffering because of it. Some of your topolgy is overly complex for the surface it describes.

Take the little area either side of the collar for example: you're coming up with fancy ways to terminate edges to keep quads, but that's totally unecessary unless you're working with subdivision modeling. Hope you don't mind, but I reconfigured the topology in that area:

Marine

why is the jacket a seperate object? you could save loads of polys by deleting the faces hidden underneath it

jec1183

I am keeping the jacket a seperate object because I actually want it to be a seperate object. So later on you can take it off. Thats why it is on a seperate texture sheet.

Daz: Thanks for the crit man. Yeah I do like to keep things in quads, I guess its just personal preference right now on the model but I could change it easily.

Rick Stirling

I've also just noticed the number of sides on the arms - is that a 12 sided cylider? I'm guessng te legs are bout 1o sides?

If so you can cut that down easily - for a 4,000 polygon model I'd really have no more that 8 sides on an arm or leg - any more than that and really don't notice it in a same engine.