Q4 Xaero

Jaco

This is Xaero, from Quake 3, with a tribal spin:







He's currently at 3296 tris (A bit high for Q4 spec? ), I'm using a 512 for the head, and a 1024 for the body. I'll post some screens from the Q4 Model viewer soon.

I'm basically finished, but some crits and comments are always obviously welcomed, especially regarding the textures.

Renders of the Hi-poly mesh I used for the normal maps:

KDR_11k

I thought he was supposed to be more like a shaolin monk than a tribesman?

MoP

Pretty good take on the guy! Very reminiscent of the original Xaero, but with some twists... I like it.

However, your proportions here have a lot of issues. Mainly the legs are far too long, and his waist is too narrow - fortunately since you've normal-mapped it, you can just scale the low-poly mesh's legs down vertically, and scale the verts around the waist to be wider - I think that would result in much better proportions and make him look more believable. Right now those legs look extremely odd.

Also on the texture I'd work on getting some more colour variation and detail into the bone parts (the one on his shoulder, and the one on the back) - maybe if they were darker and had more brownish speckling it'd look more like bone, right now they seem very plain and grey, makes them look more like plastic than bone.

Good work though, keep it up

Jaco

MoP: Thanks man, great crits! I've fixed the proportions, and I'll post the images once I'm done with the bone parts. Hopefully the next renders will be from the Q4 model viewer.

KDR_11K: In Q3 he was an augmented shaolin monk, yes. But I felt like doing something different, and I wanted to replace that arm thing on his back. And, since this is a re-design, I can do what I want .

gauss

looking pretty good so far, but as i posted in the other guy's thread who was considering redoing Xaero, i think you ought to keep in mind that Xaero's outfit is based off a traditional Buddhist robe, so "going tribal" with it is looking pretty confused right now. not that it can't be completely reconciled, but i think you're going to have to work harder at synthesizing those disparate influences.

that and MoP's keen observations aside, it's looking pretty good. keep up the good work.

Jaco

Gauss: I think I made a mistake when I referred to it as tribal, and you're right, shaolin and tribal influences would be confusing. I reckoned that the dragon skull and humerus, both very Chinese, would go well with the Buddhist robe. My other concept had a large Chinese fan on his back, maybe that would be a better approach? I am an admirer of your excellent concept work, so any advice would be greatly appreciated!

gauss

haha yeah probably, i think you'll do well if you take it in that direction. if you incorporate what MoP said it'll really be a sweet looking model!

Jaco

Just a small update:

rooster

I think its all superb till you get to the mitts- doesn't quite seem like fingers are in there. itd be nice to see them more closely fitted to fingers and hand-shape

Makkon

MUCH better. His proportions are right on. Now if you could just replace those mits with hands, he'd be perfect.

CheapAlert

His facial porportions looks more of an african than an asian imo, or at least I don't recall Xaero having large lips and a big nose.

The eyes may be too wide too

Zatoichi

Ditto. Other than that it looks great.

Jaco

Thanks for the comments guys. I've removed the offending cooking gloves (I hope), and changed the face up a bit. I'm gonna call this finished now so that I can start creating my general for the dominance war

odium

Dude the problem wasn't the colour, it was the fact hes wearing "boxes". That player model wont work well at all in Q4 because the hands will never warp nicely around the gun or trigger.

The main problems with this have been said. He DOES have black facial features with white skin, which looks quite odd. Theres also not a lot of detail to the diffuse and specular, and i dont even think you have done a height map (Something which is really suggested)

Jaco

Thanks for the comments odium. I changed the colour and the geometry of the hand, but obviously it still looks like shit . I hear what you're saying about the hands, and I agree. I'll look at some hands from the Q4 models and try to improve it.

The face does have a height map, but it isn't showing up properly in the max scanline renderer.

Isn't this enough detail for a normal mapped model's diffuse map?

As for the face, both asian people, and african people, tend to have wide cheek bones, large lips, and large noses.
But obviously this is closer to african, so I'll tweak the nose and lips a bit.

odium

Thats quite a low res texture, i dunno if its just your preview. Anyways, your height map looks quite a bit off, very dark with little contrast for bumps. Thats probably why its not showing up that good in the preview. Heres a Quake 4 one for example:

http://www.quake2evolved.com/odium/kane_head.jpg