Sci-Fi soldier for Crysis mod :)
polycounter lvl 16
Here's a character I'm working on for a crysis mod, and as an update to my portfolio. Its around 19 k triangles here, but will be reduced to 17k, it's got 2*2048 + one 1024 textures. 
Im focusing on getting the texture right for the torso before I move on to the legs. Still got alot of rough edges on the texturing and normalmap to fix. Still haven't started the specmap either You have to excuse the wonderful posing ^^
cheers! / Tor
Im focusing on getting the texture right for the torso before I move on to the legs. Still got alot of rough edges on the texturing and normalmap to fix. Still haven't started the specmap either You have to excuse the wonderful posing ^^cheers! / Tor
Replies
Love the colour scheme too.
Crits:
- The normal map on the face looks kind of fubar in some parts, around the ears, eyes and nose.
- The head/hair is obviously mirrored. It's not anything big, but you might want to disguise the seam (in the hair) a little better, or un-mirror the head.
- The fleshy part of the face/inner mouth is floating away from the teeth. Which gives characters a look like they are pressing their face against a sheet of glass and blowing. If this character was to talk, that is very distracting.
- The plates on the fingers are a little unpractical. I'm not sure the character could make a fist. Depending on how you structured the loops you might want to give the plates (on the knuckle side) some definition with loops so whoever rigs it up can control stretching and try to retain the hard edges.
Thanks alot for the comments
also - warning for overusage of smileys ^^
Yeah, the face looks kinda funky, its mostly because of the render, I render it in lightwave, and lightwave have serious trouble with normalmaps and high angles like the side of the nose and the tip of the ears, etc.
Thanks for the crits
Tell Dark he's doing a great job, as well as you and the rest of the team.
My only comment aside from the face that Vig mentioned is that the spine looks... weird. For some reason it doesn't seem to be a part of the suit cause it is popping out way too much... as if it isn't fitting inside the suit as well as not following the curvature of the body/suit. Probably cause of the dead on angle I guess.. hard to know what it really looks like.
EDIT: What I'm trying to say is.. imagine making a human character and pulling out the spine and putting it on top of the back. It looks weird.
[ame]
About the spine, maybe thats because they are loose polygons while everything else is in one piece...I'll have a look at it...
"17k, it's got 2*2048 + one 1024 textures" that's just crap ... one 2k is enough.
imho no game out there or even announced has specs near that (except fighting games where you only have two chars)
Also I agree with katzeimsack, 17,000 triangles for this character seems quite insane, can we see wireframes? I'd be interested to see where it's being spent. I'm fairly confident it could look just as good with under 10,000 triangles, since the normalmap is doing most of the detail work, all you have to worry about is large-scale silhouette, and extra polys for good deformation in anims. I have a feeling you're using lots of polys on stuff which the normalmap is quite capable of representing.
The texture count/size seems oddly high too, that's massive amounts of texture memory for just one character, could we see the flat textures? Again I reckon you could get away with half that texture budget and the character would look exactly the same unless you zoomed right in on his finger or something...
Either way, it's good work, I just think it could be more optimised
I am pretty sure that the main characters in Drakes Fortune on the PS3 are that high.
edit: yea I found the post from zbrushcentral http://www.pixolator.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=54100
his quote
" the main characters range from about 22k to 30k poly's. They do have a bunch of textures on them.. not sure really the total amount.. i haven't counted"
But I get what you are saying and most games still don't go anywhere near that. Just wanted to point out there are games out there that do.
I tend to agree that this model could do with a lot of opimisation and you wouldn't notice a thing, shouldn't need anything more than a 2048 also.
They did the same with TF2, 10k+ for the "cinematic LOD", then about half that or lower for the actual in-game, running around characters.
So in this case it's probably a good idea to build this as the "cinematic LOD" intended for closeups and cutscenes, and then reduce it to about half the polys.
And sure, maybe it doesnt need 2 textures, but then ofcourse you get half the resolution. I dont feel like I dont use the resolution, but yes it is high. I wanted to do a character with high specs for once, so, there you have it
And the thing on the nose is just the renderer treating me bad
even games in 3 years won't have that high resolutions for textures, the xbox 360 and ps3 don't have enough texture memory.
my domiance war entry had one 2k and i was able to paint skin pores in the texture.. so as long as you don't try to give every skin pore 20 pixels one 2k is fine.
for cinematics that's ok most of the time. MGS4 for example had extra cinematics models that were only shown in !small rooms! in cinematics (so that there was enough texture menomry and power to render them)...
the ingame models were way less detailed.
what i want to say is:
fine for cinematics.. but make a lowres version for the game (10k tris, one 2k texture)
http://www.ps3informer.com/playstation-3/images/uncharted-tb.jpg
http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/image/article/789/789108/uncharted-drakes-fortune-20070516073337616.jpg
those two shots show, that the drake model looks like it's about 10k and has one 2k texture ..
I'm shure it's not only looking liek that..
I guess it's the same thing tf2 and mgs4 do .. lod 0 and mipmap 0 are only shown in cinematics, lod 1 and mipmap 1 (about 10k and 2k texture) are for the ingame versions...
But it would even be ok (not good, but ok) for devil may cry. It's a 3rd person game, you always see your character.All the other characters are deffinately lower..
Marketing
they probebly had a lod algorithm and no models
As for texturesize and polycount, I will keep the polycount as low as possible without losing shapes, and maybe I'll bake the texture down, I'll see what works best. I'll probably do a test anyway. I'm thinking of redoing the head, not sure yet, see if I can save it. He looks very generic, and on top of that a bit wierd ^^
Where are his legs?
the oven, still steaming hot and all that ^^ Got some errors in it and whatnot, was before I got
around to fixing the errors, I was mostly just happy to have the bastard mapped and ready
excuse huge image-size ^^
Also I think the legs look a bit bulky compared to his torso.
The head looks good but a bit generic and is missing character in my opinion.
Sometimes when modelling a head I throw together a few headshots of actors that could play the role of the character in a movie and try to mixmatch some of their most characteristic traits.
Wrinkles, the way the eyes look, special forms of the face etc...
If you´re going for the military look with the hair, keep in mind that there are more than one hairstyles in the army.
Maybe make his hair a bit longer on the top with the sides short.
Or maybe a buzzcut with a high hairline, Bruce Willis style.
Keep going man it´s looking great.
Just some Screenshots of the Workspace no render..
aaand..the start of a new head, that needs crits badly
nice low poly texturing.
You wanna work on the flow between the two lips. The line where the lips join needs to be more shaply. I also think that in the profile view the top lip looks overly round. And that the top of the top lip should be sharper and jut out more.
You probably wanna look at the outta ear nearing the back of the head. It's hard to describe - the outlining flesh of the ear normally curls in, but in your image, it is smoothed out at this point, much more like collar flour ear.
These are just some minor things. You did a good job over all.
p.s
Also look at neck muscles
There was nothing wrong with the nose!! Now though the end looks too pointy!