Fury Mallard wants YOU!...DEAD!

Snuggles

Once again with the posting. Anywho. Right now I'm in a 3D game design class, working with another artist and 3 programmers to make something in a semester. Long story short, "FURY MALLARD: TAKE NO PRISONERS!" (The sub-title is tentative.) I'm a relative n00b to modelling, but I still find it really enjoyable. This is what I've got of our main character thus far; feel free to C&C and tear me to tiny itsy bitsy shreds.

Steve Schulze

You've got the shape down quite nicely and pretty efficiently, but you've got edges going everywhere which is going to result in some nasty shading. Try to get a more consistant mesh flow going across the body. The easiest way to learn this sort of technique is to trawl through these pimping and previews pages and see how other people structure their meshes.

Good luck with it, mate

Snuggles

Thanks for the comment! I really see what you mean, now that I look at it. Some strange ridges running around there. I'll work on that and keep looking around here. I've reduced some polys and made some edges look better...I'm having a hard time with the sides of the head, but I don't think it's anything I can't work around.

Slum

He's cute :P

My suggestion is to just kill everything behind the legs to the tip of the tail. Rather than juggling all those edges, I think it'd be quicker and easier to just knock 'em out, then extrude your open edge and shape that up back to your original form. You could duplicate the whole thing as a copy and move it out of the way. That way when you start remodelling the back half you can 'trace' the silhouette of the original to get your basic form back, but with cleaner edges.

Lore

Hmm duck.

http://web.utk.edu/~dolislag/mallardmale.jpg
http://animals.timduru.org/dirlist/bird/duck/MallardDuck-Floating_On_Lake-jpg.jpg
http://www.husney.com/~jordanh/gallery/albums/Pictures-Animals-Birds/04_LA_Venice_Mallard_Duck.jpg

You got a good start in the neck area and you got some clean up to do in the legs as far as I can see. Plus you might want to beefen up the size of the legs, they’re looking rather small to support all that weight above. With the clean up you can drop your current polycount and add it where you need it like defining the muscular structure above the bare legs or somewhere else. I also agree with everyone else about your geometry’s flow.

You have a lot of work to do before you get the body done. But what is your polycount limit aim at? How much attention to detail you want? You did say that this was a main character, so how are you viewing him? Is the game top down or 3rd person (can’t be first person as you have model this duck unless its in FMV scene)? You’ll want more geometry in the area that faces the gamer and you can get away with less in the areas the gamer will never see. Do you intend to animate him, and how?

I hope the questions helps you finalize your ideas out. Keep work at it.

Snuggles

Ahhhhhh, it took a little looking, but I got what you guys are talking about!
Slum > Yeah, some of the shading at the back was horrible. I'll probably just be taking your advice once I get access to the model again.
Lore > Those references are kickass! A lot better than the one I was usin'. The legs are pretty messy, and I see myself cleanin' them up and then adding a detail I missed (that back-claw thing I'm too dumb to remember the name of.) To be honest I hadn't even thought of the flow of the geometry at first, but I guess that's why I'm teh n00b. Now that I've seen some other polycount examples, I see that a lot of my edges just kinda...go places.

Right now the model only weighs in at around 200, but with the limits of our engine I could go up to...3000 I guess. I personally would like to be as minimalist as I can, though, so I'll probably be trying for around or under 1000. Sorry for the convoluted answer! All of those questions really have me thinking about how I'm going to direct the model in the near future. (I need to focus the most on how the model looks from behind and 3/4th views, since it's gonna be a 3rd person system.)

Thanks for your comments, guys. They're invaluable to a inexperienced grasshoppa such as me.