Chainsaw Man and a Dragonly
I hear this is a great place to get torn a new one, and improve your work. Looking for C&C on some things I made recently, so I can get them portfolio ready.
CHAINSAW MAN!
He's a classic NES style Megaman boss I designed. Armed with a pair of dual bladed chainsaws, as well as plasma cannons on each arm. It's the first time I've ever played with cell shading anything so it was a fun learning process.
I'm trying simulate what it would be like in a game using 3DS MAX's Ink'n'Paint material to handle outlines (like a game engine post-process effect would do edgefinding), with a simple flat colour diffuse map loaded into the paint slot, and a normals map (which really helps the internal outlines get inked properly).
I wanted to keep his mesh fairly dense to keep the silhouette for inking nice and smooth. He weighs in around 12k tri's, not including all the chainsaw teeth which I've decided to leave modelled since I plan on doing a few closeup shots, and possibly a quick animation.
Quick note: Click the pics for a larger image
DRAGONFLY ANTI-INFANTRY SOLDIER:
This little guy is something a I made for the 'Army of Small' Low-poly contest over at the game-artist.net forums.
Tri count for him is 989.
CHAINSAW MAN!
He's a classic NES style Megaman boss I designed. Armed with a pair of dual bladed chainsaws, as well as plasma cannons on each arm. It's the first time I've ever played with cell shading anything so it was a fun learning process.
I'm trying simulate what it would be like in a game using 3DS MAX's Ink'n'Paint material to handle outlines (like a game engine post-process effect would do edgefinding), with a simple flat colour diffuse map loaded into the paint slot, and a normals map (which really helps the internal outlines get inked properly).
I wanted to keep his mesh fairly dense to keep the silhouette for inking nice and smooth. He weighs in around 12k tri's, not including all the chainsaw teeth which I've decided to leave modelled since I plan on doing a few closeup shots, and possibly a quick animation.
Quick note: Click the pics for a larger image
DRAGONFLY ANTI-INFANTRY SOLDIER:
This little guy is something a I made for the 'Army of Small' Low-poly contest over at the game-artist.net forums.
Tri count for him is 989.
Replies
I can see that dragonfly flying around, buzzing you and hucking grenades, then flying up high and aiming the gun while out of reach. Could be pretty cool to have a little pack of those guys swarming you.
The feet/legs don't seem to be carrying any weight. If you think thats up to the animators to convey that, you need to think again. Building that into your models will really help them sell the weight, but you can't expect them to be miricle workers.
Ya he's a mega man badguy. I guess the Dragonfly is more RTS style do to the 1000 tri limit, but I would still like him to look good closer up. Any suggestions for things that are lacking?
Glad you like the Dragonfly! As for Chainsaw Man, what in particular 'grabs' you the least?
-Is it the mesh itself (topology etc)
-proportions or style of the character
-or the colour scheme
I know the meaning of the word 'weight', but I'm unsure of how to go about making this dude seem as heavy as he should (He's around 6' tall, and would weigh about 600-700 lbs or so). Perhaps you guys could help me clarify that a little bit.
Do you mean for example:
-Maybe adding some forward curvature to his lower torso, and making his arms bigger, and hang forward and down kind of 'gorilla like' so it looks like his upper body is 300 lbs. (The character is 6'1", about 600'ish pounds for what it's worth).
-Giving him some bend in the knees, and maybe widen and lower his stance to be say halfway in between it's current position, and say a sumo wrestlers ready pose.
Any tips and tricks for helping convey his weight would be much appreciated.
Chainsaw Man got bigger teeth, I also changed them to simple quads with
an opacity map instead of individually modeled. Tried to make him seem a
bit more bulky.
Improved the lighting and spec map so the Dragonfly doesn't look as washed out.
I think just changing the stance helped the chainsaw guy alot. The teeth are better too. I'm not too familiar with MegaMan so I don't really know what you're shooting for, so I don't really want to offer any changes. Maybe it's just that I don't care for the MegaMan style?
I can't tell if he is robot or armored though, I guess that would be the biggest thing. His hip joints say robot 'cause there's no way a human could fit in there. His head says human with face mask because it's too small for helmet and shaped too much like a human head to be a robot head. His shoulders are way too wide to be in armor.
-beef him up, right now he looks pretty skinny
-way beef up the chainsaws, right now they look tiny
-consider putting them on just one side, or giving the other side some kind of alternate chainsaw related weapon (slot that fires buzz saw blades?)
Definitely heading in the right direction to be a megaman badguy, just needs to be pushed a bit farther. The toon shader you're using could really use some more high-highlights too, especially to the visor so it reads as a more glass-like surface.
Edit: Oh, and re: Buzz Saw Launcher on one arm. I did consider that when I was concepting the character but Metal Man already exists and chucks buzzsaws and I didn't want to re-use weapons from existing Megaman baddies.
I'd say it's about his upper body.. it is way too slim to be "bulky".
I'm still having some big problems with his shader though. It just likes to leave weird shading 'artifacts'. In the pic below you'll see them around the divider between Chest / Stomach. On the right side chainsaw (how the shading lines are really broken and uneven and crappy.), but not so much on the left. The hose assembly that goes over his right shoulder also gets covered completely by it's own outlines thus becoming jetblack and looking like poo.
If anyone knows any good tutorials / articles / threads about Cartoon shading please post links. Google found some decent stuff, but not as much as I'd like. I really think I have to do some more experimenting with this type of shader before I can work out the bugs in this dudes materials.