WIP - Character - Assassin Creature
interpolator
Whats up guys? I just finished my last semester at school, and I am about to begin an internship. I really need to create some nice content for my portfolio to eventually get a job, and this here is to be one of my first pieces (I have other stuff up now, but not quite good enough imo).
I took a couple of days to work out a concept and here is where I am at now. I plan on treating this similar to the DWIII challenge with rules and regulations, but I will attempt to use the least polys possible whille looking like a next gen character. At this point, I want to do a character that is somewhat simplistic, as I dont want something overly challenging quite yet.
Any crits welcome
I took a couple of days to work out a concept and here is where I am at now. I plan on treating this similar to the DWIII challenge with rules and regulations, but I will attempt to use the least polys possible whille looking like a next gen character. At this point, I want to do a character that is somewhat simplistic, as I dont want something overly challenging quite yet.
Any crits welcome
Replies
Crits and/or comments are welcome.
If I had one crit it would be the hooves. They come off as too big, like they belong on a creature five times his body mass.
Good luck.
georgemancer- Thanks for the reply. Honestly, I had to look up Satyr on wiki before I knew what you meant, but yeah he definitely does look the part in those screen shots. Nevertheless, I am actually going for a more demon look as you can probably see from the concept art, but this sculpt should capture that a lot more. I simply wasn't sure how to handle the face previously as I still only had a hazy idea of what I wanted to do for it.
As for the hooves being too big, Ill play with the proportions of that soon. It might give him too much of a cartoony look with the current scale of the hooves so I may pull it back a bit, however; I still kind of like the style.
As always Critique or comments would be appreciated.
Its supposed to be like the lower portion of his face has no skin, and is showing through to the bone there. This should make it clear he is a demon; and when I am done one should be able to slightly see the line where the skin is ripped off along the edge of the mask. Currently, as I am only working with the lower subdivisions I cant show this too well, but when I am capable of adding further detail in the higher subds it should be obvious(when I can create the transition of skin to no skin layers).
I suggest you add some finer lines on the horns/hooves, though
Conte- thanks for the encouragement, this is turning out to be the first sculpt of mine I actually like.
SuPa- Yep, I added quite a bit of surface detail after all. The only reason I didn't do more detail sooner was that with the previous poly count I couldn't.
Please keep the comments and critiques coming, I think this is my personal best character and every critique helps.
WITH MASK
WITHOUT MASK
To pin point it I would have to say adjust the relation between the rib cage and the hips. It feels like there's way too much distance between the top of the hips and the bottom of the rib cage. It also feels like his rib cage is broken or seriously deformed you may be able to get away with that Im not sure. Just looking at your 3 quarter front view bothers me the way the sternum just feels almost perpendicular to the ribcage. Also the grove in the lower back for his spine seems too deep especially for his posture.
Looking at your low poly I think you should add a few more edge loops to his fore arm at least two more. One above and below the one loop you have at least. Also there seems to be some awkward edge loop termination in his face, sternum and wrist. Some closer screen shots of those areas would help to see whats going on.
I don't know if you've ever had to rig or animate a character but I think its a good idea to model as if you were going to. The way the low poly looks now it will probably deform undesirably when animated.
Thats what bothers me. Other than that nice job on the fine details, what are you using to sculpt mudbox?
I will definetly go back and play with some of the stuff you mentioned on the high poly, and yes its mudbox (I started to learn sculpt on zbrush but I now like mudbox way more).
As for the low poly, I am actually going to trash that. I just created the original low poly for the high poly sculpt.
I will make a better low poly by taking subd level 2 from my sculpt and removing loops and tweaking from there. (I use polyboost in 3ds max that has a remove loop tool that makes it really easy).
However, I will really make an effort to make this mesh usable when I am done by keeping deformation and animation in mind when I make it. I don't do animation really, and its something that I often over look so good point there too.
I admit, I kind of made anatomy up in that area my first time through instead of looking at references.
Now he should hopefully be somewhat anatomically correct (for a demon creature).
The one thing I realize that I did not do is bring the lats down and around the ribs as much as I should.
Therefore, his lats are extremely small, but I did this to maintain the characters tapered silhouette.
Unless anyone has any other important things to point out that I missed, its on to the low poly build.
Here are the changes I made, and I threw in a close up of the hands for the hell of it.
Always check reference it will make things a lot easier. Even though your character is a demon he still has the upper body of a human and the legs of a goat. It's pretty difficult to make up anatomy. Nature has done a pretty good job of creating all kinds of body parts that function well and look nice so just take from it.
Keep up the work, lets see that low poly wire frame as soon as you get it going.
Sekneox- Yeah, you could probably hear him coming from a mile away with those hooves, ha ha. But I'm not too worried, the theme isn't really a big concern of mine. But thanks for pointing that out.
btw, you ever drop by school? we still need to get together sometime and you can teach me a thing or two. I am taking the semester off to work on my portfolio so i am not really around school much, you drink coffee?
-joe
I originally was planning on removing loops off subd level 2, but I didn't like how that was going (didn't like the mesh flow); so I used polyboost build tool to create this mesh a new instead.
Right now, I figured I would post what I have for critiques while I work on his low poly clothing/armor/weapon. This lowpoly hasn't been tweaked much so I am sure there are issues to fix.
Tai- Thanks, I think if I can keep making progress in my mudbox skills I believe it will be the key to me landing a job; so much appreciated.
Johny- I sent you a private message asking if you could explain a bit more what you mean. I will definitely go back and re-work it once I figure out exactly what I need to do.
In my opinion you should always model your characters to be animated. At this point it looks like you'd get some deformation issues when animating this character.
You should go back and try to get at least three edge loops for the major joints. Also try to remove triangles in areas that are going to bend and stretch as they don't always deform well.
Specifically your Knee's look like they need to have the edges reworked and the spacing between edge loops on your lower back needs to be adjusted possibly another loop added.
You might also want to check out some books on character modeling they usually explain what type of edge work is necessary for proper deformation and what you can get away with.
So my question is, for portfolio pieces is it more important to have a low poly count, or have the character set up for proper distortion when animating. I am always uncertain of how to handle this and I just don't know what the majority of industry professionals want to see in these matters.
For example, many of the DWIII entries are not suitable for animating, but that is because they are meant only to meet the polycount and look "bad ass" once posed. It would really helpful if I get some sort of rule of thumb for this, as it is truly a balancing act between polycount and proper mesh deformation.
As for your poly count its more important that your not wasting your poly's rather than how many you use total. I was looking around for some numbers to help you out this is what i found. Using the SDK model viewer for Team Fortress 2 the original heavy weapons model comes in at 14,376 poly's the first LOD for the heavy is 9,502 the second LOD for the heavy is 6,248. If you didnt know LOD models are switched out for the higher res models when characters get further away from the camera or pov. The only other number i could find was about 5,000 polys for an unreal 3 character but im not sure how acurate that is.
So make your edge flow look nice get and enough loops on those joints so they deform nicely. If your hurting to lower your poly count the first place i would drop them from is the horns and the ears.
There are far less tri's, and hopfully none in the problems areas as before.
I also added quite a few loops, so the poly count bumped up a decent amount.
Here he is now:
Try using this as a ref and building it as low poly as you can with all the correct animation loops etc.
Keep it up.
Also i noticed you added some extra loops for the elbow joint but their very tightly spaced and add too many loops really. You need about 2 to 3 edge loops to get that elbow to work nicely one on the joint one before and one after and keep them decently spaced. Your last itiration looked okay.
So, I took your advice and ordered a book all about building meshes with loops and all quads, it should be in early next week.
I tried to look at other peoples stuff, but its still really hard to gage exactly how my particular mesh should be laid out.
I don't know, maybe what I have now done is better or okay, but I still feel that I am either sacrificing deformation for low poly counts or vice versa.
Hopefully after I read this book and with a little more experience I get it worked out.
Xaltar: I agree with your comments. As I was adding more loops to the previous version it just looked way too high poly. Hopefully this version is somewhat better
So If anyone knows of good mesh flow references by all means point me to them.
Anyways here is where I am at now.
about 300 less tri's then the first mesh, and well over a 1,000 less than the second mesh.
It's up to you if you want to start the UV's on this guy and continue to baking the normal map but you might want to hold off until you look through the book. It might cover something that will make you want to change your low poly mesh.
Keep up the progress, I'm curious to how your normal map comes out.
and look at "Low Poly Character Series" (download the videos) the meshflow is similar to what you are looking for but in much lower poly. I suggest you build it to this spec initialy then add loops to smooth it out but following the mesh flow of the model.
This is precisely why I said start over using what you have as a reference for sillouette. Removing loops and such is far slower and more troublesome than starting over and in the end you are usually still not much better off than when you started. The head has far to many polys and there are wasted polys all over the place. I don't mean to sound harsh but these are things you need to learn in order to improve, saying good job looks great won't teach you anything.
Xaltar: You need not worry about being harsh with me, I appreciate the fact that you care to help and comment.
I honestly don’t think there are “wasted” polys because I created each, one by one and placed the vertices on the edges of major changes in the high poly mesh.
Using polyboost tools, each vert is perfectly just outside of the high poly model.
So if their are too many polys, they are still doing something; but it’s really more a matter of efficiency of polys that I think I need to still work on.
As a matter of fact, Ben Mathis who’s site you pointed me to was my teacher for the past two semesters. I honestly haven’t fully watched all the videos, but I will right now. I might rebuild the mesh for the hell of it, because as they say; practice makes perfect. Thanks for keeping on top of me and reminding me of Ben’s tutorials. And I hope I didn't "piss you off" ha ha.
The mouth area on your low poly mesh seems really messy. it doesn't looks like it would deform very well. doesn't really have nice neat edge loops around it. and that thing under it seem to have an unproportionally high amount of polygons.
looks great other wise.
I would be aiming for between 3k and 4k tris with something like this with about a 1k - 2k budget over the top of that for armor/weapons. The chest just below the neck is very untidy. The 2 loops that end at the bottom of the chest should be optimised out. The back of the model looks pretty clean, try and make the front that clean and aim at stripping out about 1k tris from the model. Building it from scratch migh still yeild a better result but its up to you in the end.
Very cool that you've had Ben Mathis as an instructor ive looked at his site multiple times when looking for tutorials. Most of my instructors have mentioned his website as good resource for tut's and various info.
Xaltar: Yeah, I read in your other post (with the super low poly guy) about how you are going back to the basics. Its a good idea, and gives me a new appreciation for low poly modeling. Your crits are really helpful so I appreciate it.
Wilex: Yeah, Ben is awesome. He is super busy now though and between traveling and working with various projects, I dont think people on polycount are seeing much of him these days.
Okay, so I did remodel this guy again from scratch. I spent about a day reading the edge loops book I got, and going through tutorials from Bens site and a days worth of actually modeling him. I think I now have him down pretty good, or at least to the best of my current abilities. He is a little over 4,000 tris now and is composed of pretty much all quads. I played around with lowering the polycount further, but I dont want to loose the silhouette in certain areas. The hand for example can be lower, but then they begin to look too cartoon like in silhouette, which I dont want as you can see from the sculpt I did. I think on of the major things that saved polys this time around was less vertical loops.
Anyways thanks for the help thus far, and if you notice anything wrong with it still. Please let me know.
Anyways, I think I will go ahead and try to follow that advice as well, as I used mostly the polyboost suface move tool for postioning the verts. Looking at the horns with fresh eyes today, I can see that it might help.
This brings the tri count to an even 4,250 and I am pretty happy with it now.
Here's a grab of the back adjusted...
So, I have the UVW's done. I showed my Uv's in max and in roadkill uv on the left. The workflow I used was basically bringing more complex geometry into unfold3d magic for cutting and initial unwrap. Then using the pinning technique in Roadkill UV to tidy up any problem areas. And lastly doing all final adjustments in max. In Roadkill, it displays bright red when there is stretching and bright blue when there is commpression. I haven't found another program that displays UV problems better than roadkill so I am really glad I used it for this character. As you might notice, I have a little compression on the coin pouch he carries but it shouldn't be a problem. I really just wanted to make sure that the characters skin is completely clean.
Also, some of the geometry will be optimized further, I just didn't want to bring it down too far, as it causes all types of problems when it comes to setting up the cage for projection within 3ds max.
I'll be posting with normals soon, just have to figure out how I want to handle the import of the high res (I think its like 5 million polys). Right now, I plan on using polygon cruncher and bounding boxes in max.
Bringing the high poly in will be a challenge. The most successful way Ive seen is having it separated into chunks and having them in layers so you can hide and unhide them when you need. Or you could use something like X Normal.
http://www.xnormal.net/
As for bringing in the high poly, I have used xnormals before and got good results. I was thinking of definetly using it for an Ambient Occlustion map and mabey seeing how normals turn out by using xnormals as well. However, I don't like the whole measuring technique, so I plan on setting up a cage either way and using that cage in xnormals. But enough talk, hopefully I will have an update to show soon. As always, thanks for following my progress Wilex.
It works really great, I actually didn't have to optimize my high poly mesh at all, the full 9.5 million poly mesh ran smooth on my system in 3ds max 2009 (to my surprise). However, some weird stuff was happening with my ambient occlusion bake with mental ray, and for some reason it wouldn't bake parts of my mesh. Like whole clusters of uvs wouldn't bake, for no apparent reason no matter what I tried. For the life of me I can't figure out why. Nevertheless, I have been working around this by using xnormals to help generate the missing section of ambient occlusion but I still find the best results come from using mental ray in max.
Anyways, here is a look at just the skin portion of the character displaying the normals with ambient occlusion for the diffuse real time in 3ds max.