#24 - Demon - Zcubed

Zcubed

Ok, I'm in! I'm pretty busy these days, but this contest is too fun to pass up.

Here's a quick sketch from the margins of my Math notebook (It's way more fun than working with limits). Sorry about the lined paper...





I had a little bit of free time tonight, so I started to block in the major shapes. It's around 550 triangles at the moment.




Sorry if the thread seems a bit premature. I find that I'm far more motivated once I get some images online and set a deadline. Hopefully the mesh will become a little more interesting over the next few days. Crits and comments are always nice.

MartinKDahl

Hard to say how it will end up but i love the relaxed pose you got going, good start man!

Zcubed

Ahaha! Thanks for the encouragement, Nelis. I didn't really give you much to work with!

Here's a little update for tonight. Approaching 900 triangles.



Seems like he's turning out to be quite the generic demon. Any ideas on how to improve the design?

Zcubed

I think that's it.



Anything that needs fixing before the unwrap?

Asmuel

Looks pretty clean to me, id get unwrappen you only got a couple days left

Tulkamir

Hmm... wireframes could help, but he looks good to me. Not that I'm an expert.

Actually... now that I think on it a bit, his mohawk is too many polys I think. Seeing as it's just a single face you can pretty much just use an alpha map, there's no real point in adding in the shape of the mohawk I don't think.

What's his polycount now?

Zcubed

Ack, sorry about that. Here are some wires.



Thanks for that tip on the hair. I've never used an alpha map before, so I'm not exactly sure what the setup is . The current triangle count is 1080. I doubt I'll have any difficulty dropping the 50 or so excess triangles, I could probably collapse some edges without hurting the silhouette.

Tulkamir

No problem. Alpha's are very easy to use. Go to the "Channels" tab in Photoshop (right beside layers), create a new channel the same way you would a layer, and paint in all the area's you want transparent in black, and all the parts you want visible in white. (Grey scale works in it as well for levels of transparency). Then just save out the file as a 32 bit targa. When you load it up in Maya (or other 3d packages I assume would be the same) it'll automatically load the transparency.

And yea, you shouldn't have too much troubles dropping the polycount a bit, you can lose a few faces on the face and elsewhere.

Asmuel

Yea hes got a good point should use an alpha map theyre simple once you know how to use them, cant believe I missed that. You could probably google a tutorial that says how to use them if you get lost, it'll probably make the model look more organic breaking up that mohawk.

Emil Mujanovic

Since you're going to alpha out his hair, maybe a way to cut down some polys would be to make it one connected plane instead of several and could connect the tail into one point, then alpha out the ends so its looks like hair.



Other than that, the model is looking great and looking forward to what you come up with.

-caseyjones

Zergxes

Awesome! It reminds me of Blanka from Street Fighter 2.

Zcubed

Thanks for all the comments, guys! Much appreciated!

Tulkamir - Thanks for the quick walkthrough. I use Wings, which I'm pretty sure has alpha support.

Casey - Thanks for the paintover, I tried to implement your fixes. The guys in IRC suggested losing the tail, and I think the character looks better without it. I've also gone ahead and scaled up the head to better fit the brief.

Zergxes - Haha, a friend said the same thing. It seems quite possible that I was playing out some Street Fighter in my mind while working on the concept.

1020 triangles, this should be the last update before texturing begins.

Tulkamir

Looks nice. If you don't need any more polys I suppose it's not a huge deal, but you could actually cut down his polycount even more. You really only need one square plane for the mohawk. You can do all the rest using the alpha, which in this case could shave off another 10 polys for you to use elsewhere.

Here's a paintover to show how it'd look:



It might look ugly when not alpha'd, but that doesn't really matter because that's not what your audience sees. :P

Not entirely nessesary for this model I suppose, but none the less it is a good idea.

Also, I'm not sure if your mohawk is attatched to the model, but it looks like you might've edge extruded it out of the head. If you did, you should probably detatch it. I suppose it might not be true for all 3d packages, but to my knowlege having 3 faces come off of 1 edge is bad.

Anyways, it looks awesome, can't wait to see the texture.

Zcubed

What would I do without you guys?

Thanks again, it seems that I'm not very good at masking my inexperience. I'll replace those faces with a single plane as per your suggestion. That will give me a few more triangles to pump into his joints. And yes, I did just extrude the edges out from his head.

Hopefully I'll be able to finish before the deadline, but I really don't want to rush it out the door. I think one of the reasons that my texturing hasn't really improved is that I'm always trying to squeeze it in at the end of the project. This time around I'll make sure to do it properly, even if it means being a little bit late.

Tulkamir

Not a problem. And it'd be a shame if your model didn't get entered, it's looking great so far. If you feel like you won't be able to make it send hawken a pm, he said if he gets 5 he's extending the deadline.

KDR_11k

It means a lot of wasted texture space, you have to decide whether you'd rather have those 10 polies or more texels where you need them.

Zcubed

Thanks KDR. I would prefer to spend a few triangles if it means extra space on the texture map. Speaking of maps...



Do those look ok? I'd like to catch problems now, rather than after a few hours of texturing.

Thanks again for all the feedback, guys.

Asmuel

Maybe you would want to think about making the UV's for the mohawk a bit bigger? Id do a quick test and draw some hair on it to make sure the resolution is to your liking. Maybe you could consider less res in the face if you know you wont really need it.

There is also a little bit of black space you could possibly make use of in both maps, if your drawing directly on the maps in photoshop you might want to leave it as is to make your life easier, but if your using Z-brush or something you could pull it apart a bit to make use of more pixels.

good luk

Joao Sapiro

looks good cubed ! did you pelt map all that ?