Hard crits needed on DS chars.

JR

Hey guys. I'm trying to make some samples to my portfolio of low poly chars, aiming the NDS system.

There goes some concepts. The ideia is that those chars are on the same school and they are students of journalism. The main char is the girl of green hair. I'm not sure if she's really atractive for teens and kids audiences, or if she's attractive enough to a main char. She should pass the idea of a really dinamic person, who can shake everytyhing using her skills as a reporter. So crits and advices are very useful. The first model has 452 tris and a square 256 diffuse map.

The guys



The concept of main char



The low poly of her (textures unfinished yet)

Richard Kain

I don't want to be too harsh, but I do feel the need to bring this up. She looks quite a bit like Jade from Beyond Good and Evil. Now, she doesn't look exactly like Jade, and her color scheme is probably different enough, but I did want to mention it.

Aside from that I can't really level any real criticism against it. I love the style of the character, the 3D model is a good interpretation of the concept. Be sure to go over it for optimization, but aside from that I think its great.

[MILES]

Concepts are of a nice variety, but I'd drop the smokes, and tattoo if this is for kids/teens. The big guy is really cool, but is so stylized in comparison, that he looks somewhat out of place.

Model is nice.
Is her name Eve? I see no belly button.
It could just be the screen I'm looking at, but I think the highlights of her thighs could use a bit more "umph" so that they read a bit better in the smaller view. Hair, while probably more realistic if she has natural dark hair, seems a little desaturated and dark. Her skin color and jacket color are very close in hue when viewing the small verison. That isn't bad...but you might want a little bit more of a contrast between the two.

Those are just my first impressions...

Overall, I think its cool.

dur23

Looks like great start so far.

A few things though. At 500 triangles she would be 1/4 of the total triangles that could be drawn on the screen. So the first thing i would consider doing is bringing it down to around 300-400 depending on how many you want on the screen at once.

For the texture the biggest you should ever go is around the 128* size. Which is still really large. I like 64x128. In the sized down version of your character you can't see things like wrinkles. So most of the details you would gain out of a 256 would be lost.

Remember that you can use vertex colors to ton of fake lighting on your mesh.

Don't view your model with any kind of texture filtering on to give yourself a better idea of what it will look like in game.


I made this a while to help with optimizing DS stuff:
http://www.20threed.com/images/tuts/ds_optimization/Ds_optimization01.gif

JR

Thank you very much guys. Problably I'm going to rework the concepts... But there goes an up, with 256/128 unflitered textures.

Sage

I like the concepts and work you have. But if it's for the DS as mentioned it's a bit high. I think this might work for the PSP though.

JR

Thanks Sage. I'll think about lowering specs.

There goes the texture map, for better crits

Xaltar

You have alot of wasted texture space going on there, you have a lot of stuff using unique map cordinates that could be mirrored to give you more room on your UVs. Its also not a very good idea to have things mapped slanted like that, it makes doing straight lines and fine detail a lot harder as well as look jaggard. I like that you have unique folds etc in the jacket but I honestly think that at this res its not worth the extra UV space it takes up. Using proper miroring you could easily paint this on a 128 with the same pixil density.

Suggestions for miroring
1. torso
2. head

The limiting factor you have with handhelds is memory and with a 256 texture you are really pushing that. Try saving your current UV layout then loading it in map channel 2 and collapse stack. Then unwrap again on map channel 1 with your mirroring and simply set your material to channel 2 and render to texture setting that also to channel 2. The result will be your current texture rendered to your new UVs.

This will alow you to experiment with different UV layouts without the need to repaint every time.

JR

Hey guys. Sorry for my disappearing. I talked with girls of various ages, and it seems my designs failed with them, although I was happy with what I was made. So I spent some time doing more research and showing to some girls, they prefer something in this direction:



and mainly something like this



So, I have to do more new sketches and start again. But now thank you guys I have much more technical info about how to make models on DS, so I believe next models will be much better.

dippingsauce

Great revisions, it was definitely a good idea to get some first-hand critique from your target audience. I definitely prefer both of these new designs over the previous one.

The more punky purple-haired girl would be really appealing to pre-teens especially with her stripey shirt and cool boots... the other one is cute too, very feminine, but doesn't look as headstrong. A mix of both girls might hit the target of the dynamic lead character you're looking for~

bounchfx

the second one reminds me of pokemon female a lot. heh. the newer concepts are nice as well but I'm not sure about the face on the purple one. hair is cool.

TheSplash

I really dig the second one, she is a lot less trashy than the stereotypical "teen" characters you often see.

pior

I'd suggest raising these skirts up a bit! It looks a bit slutty on the front view, and you'll end up showing buttcracks in the back. That might appeal to the britney spears audience, but definitely not to everybody

Love the two recent concepts. Can't pick my fav as they are quite different. GuitarHero vs Myazaki...

Also regarding your earlier 3d test model you could really save tons of UV space. Not really by moving them around but by focusing on what's important. For instance human limbs are just cylinders, right? So you can just paint a tiny tiny gradient of the desired color somewhere on your map and lay many UV chunks on that tiny area. Things can overlap, share UVspace aso. Also many areas just need a flat color in my opinion, maybe enhanced a little by a hint of vertex coloring.

For the UV thing this can give an idea of what I mean (even if the specs are heavier than you are looking for, and the UV layout has not be rearranged/optimized. But you'll get the idea for the sharing principle - mostly on the red parts)
http://pioroberson.com/images/3d_pior_twisted.png

good luck! looking great so far