Sorta WIP Self Sculpture
polycounter lvl 17
Thsi is a pretty fair aproximation of me, though I do have ears. I've not done much in the way of organic modeling before, mostly Mechs and space ships for modding. However I'm aware that sticking to those won't land me a job in the industry so I've determined to broaden my repertoire. This is the third facial model I've ever made, and while it's obviously not perfect OR complete, it's the first that looks somewhat like the subject I've been modeling it from. Sorry to ruin you're new years with a picture of an ugly bastard like myself, but I promise my next work will be a crack whore.
Replies
What's the difference?
It has good points for someone new to faces, such as the eyelids. Many new people to it really mess up that area. Good to see the corners of the mouth tucking in too.
Can we see a wireframe? I know it's a sculpture, but I'd suggest focusing on polymodelling out all the main edgeloops first, then sculpting that.
Here're some screens of the LP next to the HP. The meshflow on the LP isn't perfect I'm aware, I've seen worse, but I can do better than what I've got here. I've spent no effort cleaning it up however and built the LP in about an hour. The HP in about 2.
Obvious areas to cleanup are arround the nose, above the mouth, and near the eyes. This LP model isn't intended for importing into a game but for learning sculpting, it's not UVd etc. (well how's that for a series of excuses for myself?)
Couple images of another sculpture I did. Still working on learning the tools for Mubox, but so far I'm utterly in love with it. I've got to get to more controlled images than this demon, and make a complete figure and map it with the detail next.
Screens of the Normal Mesh (UVs are utter crap, I made a Spherical map of them so I could test and see if my computer had enough memory to handle the Mapping process. Pluss a screen of the meshflow for the LP, eventually ingame head. Now I'm gonna make a body and texture for the bastard.
Hmm after looking at it again with a break from it. i find the design is somewhat blah. It's got loads of details, but they are by and large meaningless. The eyes are ok, the mouth needs reworking. I need to push the design more, use fewer larger scale details, and more small scale details.
*shrugs* Still practice work though.
you need to take your time. your work appears very messy and you are shortcutting creation steps. you need more controlled construction, a lot of your sculpting looks lumpy - try to slow down and keep the forms under control. let yourself have a clear conceptualization of what you're aiming to create, and construct it with patience and some order.
p.s. may wanna change your name. Be optimistic.
Until about a week ago I'd never done a face (LP or HP), so I'm literally diving into a new subject RIGHT now.
Making an LP model that can be mapped properly is a bitch for someone used to making stuff you can split into a million pieces and still make look good after it's textured.
The sculpting programs bring a seductive capability to fruition that had never been available before, and I gotta admit, I was blinded by the light. Million polies, instantaneous feedback, sure no prob. *drool*
As for my nickname, it's been my online nick since before the internet opened. Nothing to do with how I view my modeling. I just use it everywhere. Eventually I'll get organics under control.
Its fabulous keep at it. Great great great topology
DOn't listen to anything that was said here, you are doing ARTS.
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Don't listen to that!
The comments from killingpeople and ElysiumGX are pretty solid and I would have to agree with them. It's good to see you're getting in there and having a go with Mudbox (something I'm yet to do... Getting a copy soon) and you'll obviously improve with more experimentation.
Keep up the good work.
-caseyjones
Of corse i agree with those mentioned, but don't forget that the main thing is to love what you are doing rather than to please killingpeople and ElysiumGX 2 member highly respected of this board, i myself will probably never show my work simply becase it sucks.
Will i avoid Mudbox or Zbrush because of that ?
Tell me, will someone be jealous if i Nasscar race ?
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chances are you'll die.
but yeah, that was the message. improve on the basics of low poly character modeling, THEN use Mudbox.
While everyone wants to have their work recieve accolades, in the end that won't make them better than they are already. I've been doing mechs for basically the past 5 years because I'm good at that and I got a lot of compliments on the work I did for Mechwarrior mods, so I didn't try anything new, after all when you do new stuff you're not as good as everyone else who'se been doing it for a while. That combined with the fact that there's not a huge market for mechmodelers means I need to broaden my repertoire, not stay in my comfort zone.
I wouldn't be coming here if I didn't want the straight dope on what I should work on, not smoke blown up my ass. My goal is to be better than everyone else (naturally) however that won't happen if I fool myself or take compliments from other sites where quality modeling isn't common. There are a lot of pro's that come here, and I'd rather take a hit from somebody here that knows better than I, than an asskiss from someone on say a Bryce/Poser site.
I'm not a little kid, and I'm not just getting started on modeling, I'm just learning a new aspect of it. It's nice to get people trying to protect my feelings, but I can take a punch to the gut with the best of them. Crits on what you're doing wrong make you get better. If they'd just said "Ohh that suxor's" without why, then I'd not be learning, but they told me WHY it suxors, so I can make it better.
As Conan er Nietzche said "Don't be a pussy." Oh wait, it was "Good crits will make you a better artist." Something like that.
As for mudbox and other sculpting programs. They're fun as hell to use. That demon was fun to work on, and it got me familiar with most of the tools, and what was necessary to import models into Mudbox (I orriginally had a couple overlapping polies that Mudbox didn't like down the middle.) So I won't call it a wash, it was useful for what it taught me.
Thanks guys, both the encouragement, and the crits.
Id love to see some of your mechanical work you say you did. Im a huge mechwarrior fan, im curious if ive played anything you made
cheers!
So I think I'm fairly competent at them but after a while it get's boring. I made 23 mechs for Mercs that are in the game, plus a load more that I didn't submit or that somebody else on our mod team did better. I pioneered our preffered method of texturing (for our mod, not in general)(make an HP mech, render from various levels using Ambient Occlusion and a Skylight, use those for base textures, then paint over it. Though unfortuneately not all our mechs were textured that way.) I think my work contributed to the success of our mod (over 200,000 downloads of MP3, our last release). But I don't need to toot my own horn over a mod, because I need to get marketable or I'll be working in the service industry when I'm fifty. No thanks.
Heka modeling skills
VB ignore snap for some reason he seems intent on sabotaging your progress as an artist.
your mechs are all decent. the textures could use a some work , but all in all they are not half bad.
your organics on the other hand need a LOT of work. you seem to be making blobs with an ocasional facial feature,
and your monster seems to suffer from mudbox blob syndrome, where people mistake lots of bloby detail for real detail.
i advise you to pay more atention to forms when creating,
organic creatures are not that difrent from your mechs, they are both just machines, a lot of moving parts,, just people have a covering over most of the machine parts. the underlying structures bones, muscles, tendons. these are just like parts to a machine, most all people have all the same bones and all the same muscles, all that varrys is the size and proportions. learn these parts and learn how they work.
learn the rules then learn to break them, so next time you make your monster models you may not use the same muscles and bones as a human, but you will know how to make them look like they belong.
besides that,, practice a lot.
I KNOW where I need the most improvement, I just havn't gotten there yet.
As for the mech textures, Mechwarrior only accepts 512x512 (it's a 6 year old game with an 8 year old engine, alpha can mean either let Camo show throuh, or glow (alpha providing brightness, there's not specular or bump/normal (which I'd have KILLED for)) in our third release we figured out how to use multiple textures per mech so they got a bit better then. My textures after our first mod pack pretty much all looked as good as or better than the ones Microsoft had in the game as released (we had the benefit of softer deadlines however), so whther or not they're perfect *shrugs* I'm happy with them.
I'm sticking to LP models for a while however, I've got the point. God I love Polycount. I hesitate to call it passion, but people do CARE about things. I'll be posting and reading here more than I was.