Zbrush is coming along - silly me decided NOT to mirror the gauntlets, so I'm working through my blobby sketches trying to get them up to snuff.
This image shows a few views of the gauntlets, and the current state of the knees and the side thigh pads. The stone effect is what the textures will PROBABLY look like, though I've been working on a dull green copper look on the actual base texture.
Final update before bed. New sporran and shoulder coverings are in, using the same design as the 'power' unit on the sword (also echoed by the position of the broaches on the furs).
Pub tomorrow night. Hopefully I get it all rigged at work tomorrow lunchtime.
my only crit is that there isn't much of a flow in the design of the plate wrist guards, it kind of scatters detail. The leg ones are good, as you can see some of it drives upwards at you'd expect it.
Agreed with JFletcher that some of the detail on the armour is looking a bit noisy and arbitrary, there's no real flow or overarching design that I can see there. Still, it'll probably look fine on a normal map, I reckon.
I'm having normal map issues too - most of my model is now done, but a few parts still fail to render.
What I'm now doing is exporting level 2/3 subs as well as the top level sub, then loading the low subs into max to make sure my low poly lines up really well. Then I export the updated low poly parts and bake them against the higest subdiv in Xnormal.
A seven day demo of Polycrunch is helping matters too. For some parts I'm literally exporting chunks of my high sub div, rending them in max, then laying them back together in Photoshop. NASTY.
Chhers folks - Aldo, yeah, in those shots they are fairly covered up, but there's going to be plenty of alpha on the kilt, so the thighs will be more visible. Also, all those hanging bits are rigged, so they'll be moving around a bit.
I've got MOST of the normal map baked. I need to sort the right shoulderpad, I want to redo the thighpad and the gauntlets, and the normals were flipped on the elbows. There might be several parts reworked, but at least the normals exist now.
Jogshy got some money for Xnormal, it's a great tool.
Spec map is mostly painted, my alphas on a separate layer, I just started my glow map. The diffuse is obviously going to take the longest.
I'll build the base tonight to get me out of photoshop, I know what it is. The best thing today though was coming up with the idea for the beauty poses and working through it with another guy at work (that's not collaboration, that's FEEDBACK). I'm actually excited about it.
good job
Although it seems you haven' t mirrored anything, is there a reason for that ? because you'll be losing a ton of texture space (if that's not the case, ignore this comment, of course ), also, that may be a personal preference (checked with Spark the other day and it seem is is indeed ) but why did you separate everything like that ? is that for animation purposes ? I tend to prefer to have as few chunks as possible to avoid seams since they are quite hard to fix with normal maps even if I must have some distortion for that.
I've mirrored quite a lot - the back of the torso, the elbow, the inside/bodyside of the gauntlets, the hands, knees, outer thighpads, rear portion of the thigh armour, thigh flesh, the rear portion of the calves, the sword handle. There is only one finger.
But I should have mirrored more to save me time in the sculpt. I've got a list of parts that I'm going to update the UVs on today, thought nothing major.
I did the separation for two reason - animation (all those shoulder plates can rotate. Pointless), and to make the subtools easier to work with in Zbrush letting me take the mesh up higher since the textures were 2048s and I thought the detail would be nice. There won't be too much of an issue with normal map seams simply because the model itself is too segmented, but I'd do it differently next time.
Something shitty happened with my pen drive, so the updates I did at work today are corrupt when I brought them home - they load, but trying to save them under any time in any format crashes any app. They'll be fine tomorrow at work I'm sure.
So, these renders are based on yesterdays work: a test light bake and the first stage of my colouring. The renders are using an IES skylight set to overcast. I'm going to try and bake the information into a vertex bake. It seems that max treats normal maps differently in the red channel than Xnormal does, so I need to have a look at that.
Plan for tonight is to build and texture the base and sort out a lighting rig since I can't model or texture the model itself.
I realy like detail on normal map.
But i don't get into colors. There is not to much unify, if you know what i mean. Colors are dity, dark green and dark red going to be sad, not powerful. And blue horns, and a lot of gray. Be in mind this, its early version I suppose, so, when you get into spec power and spec color, try to get all the color to be nicely-working together:)
Maybe more agressive tonation can do some eyecandy?
I agree with Levus. You lose a of the detail of the armor with it being black. Maybe if you put a really 'white' spec on the armor, the details will pop more.
I also think the 'sad' vibe comes from his mouth being a frown...maybe if he had a different expression, it would be more 'dark and brooding' than 'sad'
Yea, that armour is too dark - those are yesterdays textures, the actual armour is lighter with a blueish/greenish tinge to it, like and old copper statue.
The time for critiques is over so I'll offer my praise:
The individual elements are beautiful. I particularly like the work on the armor pieces for the legs and forearms.
Replies
Zbrush is coming along - silly me decided NOT to mirror the gauntlets, so I'm working through my blobby sketches trying to get them up to snuff.
This image shows a few views of the gauntlets, and the current state of the knees and the side thigh pads. The stone effect is what the textures will PROBABLY look like, though I've been working on a dull green copper look on the actual base texture.
Pub tomorrow night. Hopefully I get it all rigged at work tomorrow lunchtime.
my only crit is that there isn't much of a flow in the design of the plate wrist guards, it kind of scatters detail. The leg ones are good, as you can see some of it drives upwards at you'd expect it.
dunno, might just be me.
great detailing though
I'm going to spend some time playing with map generation this morning - sculpting the armour requires a break every now and then.
Agreed with JFletcher that some of the detail on the armour is looking a bit noisy and arbitrary, there's no real flow or overarching design that I can see there. Still, it'll probably look fine on a normal map, I reckon.
Cool initial pose too, it's coming along nicely!
I do wish I could mask off areas of sculpting and then copy and paste them onto other tools.
And there are lots of polycounter names carved into it...
What I'm now doing is exporting level 2/3 subs as well as the top level sub, then loading the low subs into max to make sure my low poly lines up really well. Then I export the updated low poly parts and bake them against the higest subdiv in Xnormal.
A seven day demo of Polycrunch is helping matters too. For some parts I'm literally exporting chunks of my high sub div, rending them in max, then laying them back together in Photoshop. NASTY.
I've got MOST of the normal map baked. I need to sort the right shoulderpad, I want to redo the thighpad and the gauntlets, and the normals were flipped on the elbows. There might be several parts reworked, but at least the normals exist now.
Jogshy got some money for Xnormal, it's a great tool.
Spec map is mostly painted, my alphas on a separate layer, I just started my glow map. The diffuse is obviously going to take the longest.
I'll build the base tonight to get me out of photoshop, I know what it is. The best thing today though was coming up with the idea for the beauty poses and working through it with another guy at work (that's not collaboration, that's FEEDBACK). I'm actually excited about it.
Although it seems you haven' t mirrored anything, is there a reason for that ? because you'll be losing a ton of texture space (if that's not the case, ignore this comment, of course
But I should have mirrored more to save me time in the sculpt. I've got a list of parts that I'm going to update the UVs on today, thought nothing major.
I did the separation for two reason - animation (all those shoulder plates can rotate. Pointless), and to make the subtools easier to work with in Zbrush letting me take the mesh up higher since the textures were 2048s and I thought the detail would be nice. There won't be too much of an issue with normal map seams simply because the model itself is too segmented, but I'd do it differently next time.
Alex
Something shitty happened with my pen drive, so the updates I did at work today are corrupt when I brought them home - they load, but trying to save them under any time in any format crashes any app. They'll be fine tomorrow at work I'm sure.
So, these renders are based on yesterdays work: a test light bake and the first stage of my colouring. The renders are using an IES skylight set to overcast. I'm going to try and bake the information into a vertex bake. It seems that max treats normal maps differently in the red channel than Xnormal does, so I need to have a look at that.
Plan for tonight is to build and texture the base and sort out a lighting rig since I can't model or texture the model itself.
I realy like detail on normal map.
But i don't get into colors. There is not to much unify, if you know what i mean. Colors are dity, dark green and dark red going to be sad, not powerful. And blue horns, and a lot of gray. Be in mind this, its early version I suppose, so, when you get into spec power and spec color, try to get all the color to be nicely-working together:)
Maybe more agressive tonation can do some eyecandy?
Keep going with this badass!:)
I also think the 'sad' vibe comes from his mouth being a frown...maybe if he had a different expression, it would be more 'dark and brooding' than 'sad'
Looking good though.
quick. dirty. Nasty.
Textures.
Skin fixes
Pose
Sword handle
Accessories
More alpha masks
12 hours....
liking the sword glow effect
The Red coating on the left shoulder could have a dark or maybe a gold border.
And on the shin and wrist plates I'd go for silver in that case!
Keep it up!
The individual elements are beautiful. I particularly like the work on the armor pieces for the legs and forearms.
Congrats sir