lol :P i really like the new pose! maybe you can turn her head so that she looks in to the camera at 3/4? or move the camera a bit to the left so you can see her face better? i have no idea how to make this look more evil.. the dragonfly wings just make it seem cute, and fairy-like. Also: spend some more time on the eye of the beast, i think that could make it a lot more evil (just the diffuse)
well keep it up! it looks great!
turned out really great, especially the mount - i dont think i like the design for the chick ( the mismatch, even done in purpose, between the mount and the rider's designs might be too strong for my tastes) but the poses and the overall result is very pleasing:)
Thanks, guys! The mount's eyes got some attention, and also added spec to the rest. Not sure about adding make-up, I don't want to make Lola look goth with dark make-up, or like going to parade, since she's going to war... I just feel that whatever I do with her face, I'll just make it worse (especially with angry brows >:|), so I guess I'll just leave it as is, and perhaps just rotate her eyes so she is looking at the camera. But as I said, I don't think evil is necessarily meant to be read from facial features. What can I do, whatever I make ends up looking innocent and maybe somewhat cute =\
Things left to do tomorrow when I get back from work:
- Tweak the lights
- Tweak the textures a bit
- Add some plants to the pedestal rock
- Fix the pose (her head can't turn all that much because of the helmet, it just looks really weird when it's deformed, so maybe I'll just turn her whole torso more).
Here's what I have for now:
I'm so tired of working on this, I can't wait to hit submit button and finally get some real sleep.
I know you said you spent some love on it, but I actually think the eye detracts from the overall character of the mount. It looks too intelligent now, if that makes sense?
A problem I'm seeing with a lot of the [awesomely] normal mapped characters is that the actual diffuse seems to be lacking a lot. It looks like its missing all the rich color tones and mixtures that straight diffuse maps get, relying too much on the normal to do everything. If you turn off the normalbump, how does the texture look? From the shots shown, it all looks like straight color-fills. This isn't meant to be disheartening, as I'm sure you've poured many hours into them - but I'm not sure they're reading. You might need to exaggerate them more to get it to come across. Most noticeable offenders are the haunches on the beast - looks almost like a solid cream fill with the normal information - and her maroon armor, again it seems a solid color. Perhaps even just some overlays to add some variations would suffice.
Anyhow, its all coming together, and the modelling is superb. I post all this in the hopes that you rally and really give it your all in these last remaining hours.
Here's a quick paintover I did to try and show what I mean. Take it with an immense grain of salt.
I know what you mean. Right now she looks like she's contemplating dinner tonight, not the fact that she's riding some kind of beastly monster horse.... thing. The wings are exceptional, but they seem a little dull. Insectiod wings ahve certain iridescent quality that these don't seem to capture exactly. Perhaps work with the texture parameters or maps a bit more, if there's time?
Looking good man, good crits have been given though. When you tweak the lights, try to get some harder shading, it almost looks like its just self-illumination at the moment. And cast some damn shadows!
You've got some awesome detail in the normal map, but with that lighting setup it isn't showing up.
Im eagerly awaiting the final renders!
I agree with EQ, I looks to me like DOF focus has been centered on the ground and thus blurring out the characters themselves. ( I know this probably isn't the case, I'm just making comparison)
The textures really could've done with an extra push like sectaurs suggested.
The normalmap turned out terrific, it'd be a shame if the final result couldn't do it justice.
Beauty (rendered at 11:52 on Monday! so it was far from what I hoped to have, oh well):
Textures:
Construction:
Well, all your comments are in place, but the thing is I really worked on those things, yet it was hard (read impossible) to make them show up in this tiny 800x900 render, which made me feel the whole contest was so pointless, and I still feel that way. It's for real time characters and they are supposed to be viewed real time, so that you can see incandescent shader actually doing its job, and not me trying to adjust the camera angle to make it show up at extreme angles and then have to wait 20 minutes for render. I didn't even have to spend time making the backpack, because you can't even see it in any of the renders. Also, I added fine textural details to the skin, clothing and the shell, but of course they didn't show up on top of all the filtering and post processing, and you can't see them on the tiny texture sheet either. I wonder what was I thinking... So I figured I will not make any more models that are not aimed at ending up in game. Anyways, didn't get to do much on Monday, it was the first day of alpha so I got about two hours to put this together and no time to chill and do nothing this whole week, as I hoped. Oh well, can't wait to start on something new, although not sure how soon that will be.
Sorry about this rant, didn't mean to disrespect all the effort everyone has placed into this, or disregard the good crits I've received, it's just the way I feel about my own entry, and... well, I need to get some sleep now too.
Still lovely work dispite the render size limiting the detail visible. I did a sharpen and contrast tweak on this one just to see if it would show the detail better...
I think for the next domwar we should have a better res allowance to show our work, I was also anoyed that 90% of my normal details didn't show in my final renders
well thats the way of dealing with "do only what can be seen"
but anyways.. i think your texture need only to be pushed one step further.. you have lots of smal-detailings but as you say by yourself.. it doesn´t show up very well in tiny shots .. so you need some more .. graphical stuff.. e.g. give special parts borders with contrast colors or prints, variations of color/brightnes on parts wich look bit to simple.. your model/texture has to work from smal to big scale
and something i noticed.. the seams on the foreleg, where the legs meets the body, can be reduced if you paint the plate-color also on the body-uv-part..
but i realy like this model and with some more work (as i said) on the textures this would be killer^2 bc the normalmap is kickass
and keep on.. i love you stuff!
btw.. how do you render?.. it took me only.. hmm well.. less than a minute for one render
Right on the spot with those seams, rollin. That's one thing I didn't get a chance to do - go into body paint and paint the seams, but they aren't very visible so there's the advantage of small render size :P
As for the render, I used mental ray, raytraced shadows and reflections (not that you can see reflections anyway, but there's the reflection map also), and that on production quality settings takes a very long time to render.
When I regain some energy, I'll go back and tweak textures some more and render a turntable so hopefully you will be able to see reflections and iridescence and spec actually working.
I found the 800x900 ample space. I think the problem you were having was trying to fit your mount's huge wing span into a portrait oriented shot. I would have chosen to crop the wings from the construction shots and pull in tighter to really show off the detailing you have on the core. I think the issue of the normals not showing is just a lighting issue. It looks like your beauty and winning shots were mostly back lit so its hard to see any of the work you did.
I also took about 30 seconds for my renders, hell i think my screen caps look better than the renders i did.
You did a fantastic job on this thing. The sculpting is top notch, especially for doing both a character and a mount. Its just too bad that you ran out of time for the resentation.
Great work, but the final render looks a bit like small plasic figures
Oh and I can't quite put my finger on it since the geometry and the sculpting looks great, but after that colormap is applied it looses much of its apeal and looks somewhat "washed out". It is a bit puzzeling
This is a beautiful piece of work fogmann. I can sense your frustration with the render stage and how things turned out, and I'd agree that they don't show the work in its best light.
Sometimes work intended for realtime just looks plain odd rendered for a multitude of reasons, and you really have to tweak the hell out of things to get anything remotely decent pumped out. Ive definitely had that experience on projects numerous occasions and I always wince when a producer asks me for 'quick character renders' It aint ever quick, and it's rarely easy to get good results. Rendering isn't something we tend to do a ton of as game artists so it can be a bit of a daunting black art.
For what its worth, adding to what mvelasquez has said I think that re-visiting the composition, posing and lighting sometime could get you some far better results. In both of those shots youre looking down on the character, and thats going to lose some impact right there. Try an angle akin to looking up at a sculpture (e.g http://www.victorianweb.org/sculpture/thornycroft/boadicea1.jpg
) for something a bit more dynamic. That way you dont have to depict much of anything in the way of a background or ground plane either, since that didn't particularly help your piece. It's easy to forget, but real life reference can also help a ton with deciding on a light rig, a pose, and composition.
Dont be remotely disheartened though. Youve got a fantastic couple of models for the reel here and Im sure you learnt a bunch! It's really top notch work.
I've loved this model from concept to completion. However I think the dark and sinister feeling I got from the concept was lost somewhere along the way. It could just be lighting, or render settings... but I get a more light and happy feeling from the completed version. If that was how it evolved for you as an artist, then mission accomplished. If you see what I'm saying, then I'm sure you'll find a way to add that last bit of tweakage to get it back in line with the mood of the concept.
Replies
well keep it up! it looks great!
chico
Things left to do tomorrow when I get back from work:
- Tweak the lights
- Tweak the textures a bit
- Add some plants to the pedestal rock
- Fix the pose (her head can't turn all that much because of the helmet, it just looks really weird when it's deformed, so maybe I'll just turn her whole torso more).
Here's what I have for now:
I'm so tired of working on this, I can't wait to hit submit button and finally get some real sleep.
I know you said you spent some love on it, but I actually think the eye detracts from the overall character of the mount. It looks too intelligent now, if that makes sense?
A problem I'm seeing with a lot of the [awesomely] normal mapped characters is that the actual diffuse seems to be lacking a lot. It looks like its missing all the rich color tones and mixtures that straight diffuse maps get, relying too much on the normal to do everything. If you turn off the normalbump, how does the texture look? From the shots shown, it all looks like straight color-fills. This isn't meant to be disheartening, as I'm sure you've poured many hours into them - but I'm not sure they're reading. You might need to exaggerate them more to get it to come across. Most noticeable offenders are the haunches on the beast - looks almost like a solid cream fill with the normal information - and her maroon armor, again it seems a solid color. Perhaps even just some overlays to add some variations would suffice.
Anyhow, its all coming together, and the modelling is superb. I post all this in the hopes that you rally and really give it your all in these last remaining hours.
Here's a quick paintover I did to try and show what I mean. Take it with an immense grain of salt.
lil thing.. if you want a back-shot you should pose her like she is looking behind .. over her owne shoulder (eyes?)
atm shes looking a bit daydreaming
-Dread_Reaper
You've got some awesome detail in the normal map, but with that lighting setup it isn't showing up.
Im eagerly awaiting the final renders!
The textures really could've done with an extra push like sectaurs suggested.
The normalmap turned out terrific, it'd be a shame if the final result couldn't do it justice.
I hope you got things done on time. It would be a shame if your presentation didn't show your hard work in its best light.
Winning:
Beauty (rendered at 11:52 on Monday! so it was far from what I hoped to have, oh well):
Textures:
Construction:
Well, all your comments are in place, but the thing is I really worked on those things, yet it was hard (read impossible) to make them show up in this tiny 800x900 render, which made me feel the whole contest was so pointless, and I still feel that way. It's for real time characters and they are supposed to be viewed real time, so that you can see incandescent shader actually doing its job, and not me trying to adjust the camera angle to make it show up at extreme angles and then have to wait 20 minutes for render. I didn't even have to spend time making the backpack, because you can't even see it in any of the renders. Also, I added fine textural details to the skin, clothing and the shell, but of course they didn't show up on top of all the filtering and post processing, and you can't see them on the tiny texture sheet either. I wonder what was I thinking... So I figured I will not make any more models that are not aimed at ending up in game. Anyways, didn't get to do much on Monday, it was the first day of alpha so I got about two hours to put this together
Sorry about this rant, didn't mean to disrespect all the effort everyone has placed into this, or disregard the good crits I've received, it's just the way I feel about my own entry, and... well, I need to get some sleep now too.
Either way, best of luck to all who submitted!
I think for the next domwar we should have a better res allowance to show our work, I was also anoyed that 90% of my normal details didn't show in my final renders
but anyways.. i think your texture need only to be pushed one step further.. you have lots of smal-detailings but as you say by yourself.. it doesn´t show up very well in tiny shots .. so you need some more .. graphical stuff.. e.g. give special parts borders with contrast colors or prints, variations of color/brightnes on parts wich look bit to simple.. your model/texture has to work from smal to big scale
and something i noticed.. the seams on the foreleg, where the legs meets the body, can be reduced if you paint the plate-color also on the body-uv-part..
but i realy like this model and with some more work (as i said) on the textures this would be killer^2 bc the normalmap is kickass
and keep on.. i love you stuff!
btw.. how do you render?.. it took me only.. hmm well.. less than a minute for one render
As for the render, I used mental ray, raytraced shadows and reflections (not that you can see reflections anyway, but there's the reflection map also), and that on production quality settings takes a very long time to render.
When I regain some energy, I'll go back and tweak textures some more and render a turntable so hopefully you will be able to see reflections and iridescence and spec actually working.
I also took about 30 seconds for my renders, hell i think my screen caps look better than the renders i did.
You did a fantastic job on this thing. The sculpting is top notch, especially for doing both a character and a mount. Its just too bad that you ran out of time for the resentation.
Oh and I can't quite put my finger on it since the geometry and the sculpting looks great, but after that colormap is applied it looses much of its apeal and looks somewhat "washed out". It is a bit puzzeling
Sometimes work intended for realtime just looks plain odd rendered for a multitude of reasons, and you really have to tweak the hell out of things to get anything remotely decent pumped out. Ive definitely had that experience on projects numerous occasions and I always wince when a producer asks me for 'quick character renders' It aint ever quick, and it's rarely easy to get good results. Rendering isn't something we tend to do a ton of as game artists so it can be a bit of a daunting black art.
For what its worth, adding to what mvelasquez has said I think that re-visiting the composition, posing and lighting sometime could get you some far better results. In both of those shots youre looking down on the character, and thats going to lose some impact right there. Try an angle akin to looking up at a sculpture (e.g http://www.victorianweb.org/sculpture/thornycroft/boadicea1.jpg
) for something a bit more dynamic. That way you dont have to depict much of anything in the way of a background or ground plane either, since that didn't particularly help your piece. It's easy to forget, but real life reference can also help a ton with deciding on a light rig, a pose, and composition.
Dont be remotely disheartened though. Youve got a fantastic couple of models for the reel here and Im sure you learnt a bunch! It's really top notch work.