Gears of War PSP Character
interpolator
I have several projects running currently but what's one more small one right?
Anyways, I have never done (what I consider) a really low poly character, like ball park 500 tri's; so I thought I would give it a shot. If this goes well, I might make several more characters like this from the Gears of War game.
Here are the stats I am aiming for:
Marcus Fenix Mesh: ~600 tris, 256x256 map
Gears Of War Assault Rifle: ~ 100 tris, 128x128 map
Most pieces on the gun are detached and I deleted all the extra faces; but still no dice in regards to meeting the tri count. Not a big deal though because it was just a random guess of what the tri count should be before I started.
Lastly, I browsed through the entire low poly game art thread at polycount today; trying to get a handle on tricks for mesh flow, deformations, and so fourth. Then created the meshes you see here.
So, if you see anything I need to change or have critiques or comments, please let me know.
The image below pretty much explains where I am at now.
Anyways, I have never done (what I consider) a really low poly character, like ball park 500 tri's; so I thought I would give it a shot. If this goes well, I might make several more characters like this from the Gears of War game.
Here are the stats I am aiming for:
Marcus Fenix Mesh: ~600 tris, 256x256 map
Gears Of War Assault Rifle: ~ 100 tris, 128x128 map
Most pieces on the gun are detached and I deleted all the extra faces; but still no dice in regards to meeting the tri count. Not a big deal though because it was just a random guess of what the tri count should be before I started.
Lastly, I browsed through the entire low poly game art thread at polycount today; trying to get a handle on tricks for mesh flow, deformations, and so fourth. Then created the meshes you see here.
So, if you see anything I need to change or have critiques or comments, please let me know.
The image below pretty much explains where I am at now.
Replies
You could even go as far as to make his right hand into a fist, since it would be clenched around the gun all the time anyways. You can leave the other hand more detailed for cradling the gun and making gestures. The polies you save here might be better used to give the legs a nicer silhouette in front view.
I also think his jaw is too rounded, needs to be more squared off and chiseled, IMHO. For this you don't necessarily need more polies, just push around what you have a bit.
Also, if your aim is 600 tris for the character you still have 10 tris left! It might not seem like much at all, but then consider that the front part of the face is only 12 tris now, and how much 10 tris would add to that.
Alternatively, you could use these to improve the knee area for deformation. Having a knee come to a single point doesn't look very nice, especially when the character crouches. It's better to have it come to two points, so that it looks squared off when it bends rather than a sharp point. This would add 4 tris in each knee.
And then you still have two polies left for the face! :poly142:
Yes I'm anal, I know. :poly136:
Actually, I think the proportions are spot on. I always make really good orthographic if at all possible and I took screen shots directly from the game- in the editor. Of course I have to deal with the annoying perspective view, but after doing some intensive lens correction in PS they should be near perfect.
Honestly though, I was thinking the same thing about the arms being a tad too small. I think it might be because the nature of it being low poly gives the mesh sharp angles, and doesn't give it that full volume look to the arms.
So what do you guys think?
While the silhouette may be correct, should I pump his arms up more to emphasis this on the low poly? Is this something a lot of people have to do?
DemonPrincess: That's seriously a really helpful critique there, thanks a lot. I never even considered that I could make one hand more low poly then the other. That's an awesome idea. I think I will see what I can do about removing some loops there and optimizing the hands further. Any extra Tri's I'll put in the face and possibly the knee area like you mentioned
.
However, if I can get him under 700 tri's with the gun included (~600 for the character + ~100 for the gun = 700 tri's) I will attempt to keep it at 700.
This is the kind of advice I can't get just searching the web, so please keep it coming!
Like I said in the beginning of the thread, this is my first time doing a really low poly character like this. I actually figured out what the proper tri counts and the texture sizes should be by looking at Genz's work on cgsociety.org :
http://genz.cgsociety.org/gallery/578595/
It's really what inspired me to give really low poly modeling a shot. Actually it was that, and the fact that many people here at polycount stress how good doing super low poly pieces is for learning purposes.
So I guess I should paint in what ever color depth PSP uses. I really have no idea what that system uses, anyone out there know?
Well, here is the work I did on the mesh and I am pretty satisfied with it now. I optimized the hands a whole lot. The left hand is like a mitten now, simply for cradling the gun. And the right hand is similar to the way it was before, minus some loops and buffers.
This saved quite a lot of tri's as Demon Princess pointed out it would. I put all these extras into the face, except a couple more on the legs, and one more on the inside of each bicep to add more volume to them.
So now I have exactly 700 tri's including the gun. Woo hoo!
So, I will just sit tight to get some feedback for today, and move on tomorrow.
Good job on getting the polycount down! It's better to have his right hand as the mitten though, unless he's lefthanded. I'll show you in the form of a picture.
Here are some screenshots of the Klesk character from Quake 3: Arena. It shows why the right hand can stand to be less detailed than the left one. For the record, this character is 802 triangles (excluding gun).
Look at how thick these dudes are, you croped your reference poorly dude.
man my link didnt show up
http://gaygamer.net/images/gerasofgay.jpg
I may not be doing the lens correction properly in photoshop then.
Here is a random screen grab from inside of the editor
He does look much wider just from this angle to me, but due to the perspective view, I can't use it for orthographic. When I attempt to fix it, I get the results you have seen posted here. This is obviously a really important thing to have correct, so if you have any suggestions of how to correct the image for orthographic please let me know.
DemonPrincess: Yeah, I see what you mean about characters holding the gun. My thought was that I wanted him to have a usable trigger finger on the trigger. This meant that I would have to have the right hand with the original 3 finger setup. I thought the left hand could be the mitten one because it would just be used to cradle the gun. If he gestures, his left hand continues to hold the gun, and his right makes the pointing ect.
The was just my line of thinking, so that I could still give him a trigger finger, and optimize the hands to the greatest extent.
Do you think that makes sense, or should I just go with the standard setup you mentioned from Quake 3 arena?
I'm really happy I am getting a bunch of responses here so quickly. Thanks allot, its really helping me along here.
[edit]
oh yeah, Earthquake; I get a forbidden error when I try to access that link so I haven't been able to see it yet.
maybe just looked at the f'ed up version too long.
The proportions are significantly different. I did some comparisons in photoshop to make sure, but I'm not going to show those as it would make things too messy.
Holi, I thought that was an actual image you found, but I realize now that its just my image stretched (duh). But thanks anyways.
I'm interested to hear what you guys think of the new image in regards to using it as an ortho.
take a break then, for a day or something,really let your eyes [or in this case, perception of this character] restore. but of course if time is of an issue... battle it.
i second what vahl said.
about the model, proportions aside, it looks good to me. make sure to 4096 that sucka up!
Eyeball it.
Done!
For clarity I could have just painted in colors for the different sections in photoshop arms legs etc. or even go into textured view in the left viewport.
EarthQuake: Your right, I should have trusted my initial instincts that something was wrong with the proportions, especially when Cody brought it up; but I kept telling myself it wasn't possible because I had the model right in front of me.
ImSlightlyBored: Your right too. I don't have a dead line for this, and I am gonna call it quits for today. I'm pretty happy though that I have found something that works for me now.
Thanks for helping me through this everyone.
I think the movement of the trigger finger would be too minute to notice. Especially consider the size of a psp screen! I also think it makes more sense to keep holding the gun with the right hand, because that way the character could theoretically still fire the gun from that one hand. That is, assuming that he's strong enough to fire a large gun from a single arm... then again he's pretty beefy.
Believe it or not, I have never played a psp or hardly seen one; so its kind of hard for me to imagine the resolution on one. I think I will look up some screen grabs of psp games online for more references. In any event, I will make the necessary adjustments.
Thanks!
right, before you do any more modelling, take a render of your dude at 480x272 with him at the size you'd expect to see him- that is the resolution of the PSP
Also, just because the PSP is a handheld, it doesn't mean you have to be tight with your polycounts- you could easily get away with a 1500 tris character and extra for the weapon PLUS have a pretty full environment.
The main issue is memory- especially when it comes to textures- you want to aim to use 4bit and 8bit palletes as much as possible. So best thing to do is use lots of smaller textures, maybe even setting it up so that anything of similar colour are on the same texture so you can use as few colours as possible.
128x128 for head and 256x256 would be ideal if you were to use the character for cutscenes and in game, halve it if it's just purely in game and you don't get within a meter of the character.
maybe they scaled the models ingame with some command?!
It's actually not my goal to make a PSP character per say, I was really just interested in creating a character with the specs I listed and figured that it was close to the specs of the characters on the PSP. Guess I was wrong there.
Rollin: Thanks for pointing that out. Yeah, it really makes me wonder just what exactly is going on, like the perspective view gets warped way more than expected.
Anyways, I am just going to stick with the new proportions I got from the left viewport in Unreal Ed (image above). This makes him look more like people expect I think.
I switched the hand over to the standard setup, pointed out by DemonPrincess, and setup the UV's today with the help of unfold 3d magic. Hopefully tomorrow I'll get to painting.
I found this file a while a go on the epic dev network. Its an example of how they rig there characters, I think. Anyways, its a max file version of Marcus, I realise that this is kind of "cheating" in a way, because normally if you are modelling a character you will usually only have image ref, but to help make sure that you have you proportions correct you might want to use it or if anyone else is interested, the links below.
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/rsrc/Three/GearsMods/Gears_Marcus.max
Cheers
Chris
"if you are trying to improve your skills as an artist, using a 3d model might not be the best way to do so"
Why is that? The best way to learn is to see, be it a photograph, be it from nature be it a sculpture or whatever, but especially for human characters a 3d scan is much closer to nature then any anatomy book could ever be, of course you usually don't have your hands on 3d scans for your work, but i think it is totally opposite, a correct 3d scan is the best way to learn, as you can't have it clearer and closer to the source, a 3d scan has no diffusion like real skin has, no colors that can distract you, you can see exactly whats going on with the surface it's no interpretation by you or another artist, sculptures, paintings, anatomic illustrations etc are just interpretations, but a 3d scan to me is THE source. At least for me, if i need to rebuild something i try to get the best references possible and in this case of course the original Marcus is the best source to reproduce him for another platform. Lets say it with the words of another artist "an artist is only as good as his reference" and i think thats totally true if it comes to recreating something thats already existing.
Is the perspective warp just due to the focal length of the camera? Like bringing a wide angle lens right up close to something.
Nice work i hope u kick ass texturing it, GL!
BTW u could close his right hand and give some extra loops in his hip, that would be nice for the animation
ultra
Nice model btw! Looking good so far
@gir: yes thats how i understood it and i still don't get it, why is it not the best way to learn? What is different from a concept , illustration, photo, sculpture, painting whatever? It's just another medium - to me equal to all the others, so why is a 3d model not a good reference? What can you learn from the other references and not from a 3d model?
if it were a simple 3d rotation, or a mesh which is designed to be 100% accurate to the human physique. with hideable muscle groups/flesh etc. then it would be a brilliant learning tool.
using Marcus Fenix, who is heavily stylised would be a bad example of a model to use if you're trying to learn anatomy.
But what if he/she wants to make a similar style? All depends.
Cody: yep, I hope not to disappoint.
Coridium: Thanks a lot for that, but I am almost finished texturing, so I am probably just going to finish texturing the way I am going, then possibly edit the model if I see any major problems. So I Downloaded it, but don't plan on looking at it until I post for c&c tomorrow.
Neox: Good point, I bought a anatomy model off turbo squid a year ago for the very reason you mention; its great for learning when you can actually see it and rotate it real time.
Carlo_c, karera, ultra and rest: Thanks for looking and for the encouragement.
I should be able to post a near finished and textured version tomorrow for c&c. I have yet to do the arms and gun.
Edgeflow, topology, proportions, meshdensity, colorchoices, efficieny are things you can't learn from another well made model? As Blaizer said, why are so many guys asking for wires if you can't learn anything from another model? it's like saying you can't learn from other drawings, paintings or sculptures, be it the strokes, the characteristic flow, the hatching or the formspeach, there is so much you can learn from premade art, why should it be different with digital models?
You saying that is like a classical sculptor saying he can't learn from Rodin, no offense, plain stupidness/ignorance.
come all down.. using good art to lern from (learning is NOT stupid copying) is a method that no one who claims himself not-ignorant can deny but you don´t HAVE-TO do it this way of course..
this is the beginning and end of every serious discussion about that topic.. so stop spaming this guys thread now (if you love this issue so much you can of couse make a new thread about it
waiting for the textures
Or... maybe not. :poly144:
All jokes aside, looking forward to the texture!
To be honest I was kinda nervous about posting now that so many people have been watching this thread, but as always C&C welcome.
Here are some screen grabs I threw in Photoshop to show where I am at.
The stats should be self explanatory from the images, but I found a couple stray verts so I saved 4 tri's, and I used the full color palette cause I really didn't want to limit myself with colors. I used all my tricks to create these textures. Started off doing mostly projection painting in Bodypaint, then tidying up, then hand painting in Photoshop and Bodypaint, and mixing layers and so fourth. The face was mostly hand painted as the projections were turning out like crap.
Sorry in advance for the resolution on the first one, I just wanted to show any of the pixilation that is coming up. Also, I posted the full size of the texture maps in the second image.
For your own benifit. Start over, and do this project as if you were the character artist on the new up-in-coming game "Gears of war" exclusively on PSP. Pretend it never came out on any other console, and use hawkprey's concept art.
concept : http://www.hawkprey.com/Gears.htm
What I am saying is...Go back to the source and create your product...To be accurate would you rather draw from an interpretation, or from the source?
..cause this is weak sauce for the lose at the moment
dave
Like I said in the beginning of this post, I have never created a low poly character with these specs. So my goal was to simply do a conversion of the roughly 12,000 tri character in Gears of War to the same character with under 600 tri's and 256x256 maps.
I wasn't trying to reinvent the wheel here, just convert to low specs.
Dave: First off, let me say I like your work. I don't think I have ever seen those concepts before you listed, so I certainly couldn't have based it off them. I appreciate you bringing them to my attention, but I would sooner start a new project rather than re-do this one.
In any event I feel I have learned a lot from this project, like for similar reasons that Neox was saying. I pretty much got a chance to dissect this awesome model from Gears and put it back together again as a compressed version.
I was using the same kind of texturing techniques I saw in Ian Joyner's Gnomon DVD, where you take photos and "Photoshop" them on the texture sheet. Only in this case my photos were screen grabs of the actual Marcus Fenix model. As a small point, I didn't nor would it really be advantageous; to take the pre-built textures from Epic and rearrange them in my texture sheets. For one, they wouldn't look as good because they wouldn't have the normal information or specular, and two its actually easier to just project from Pictures of a real model, into Bodypaint.
So again, there was stuff hand painted, like the face for instance; but it was done looking at photos of the actual model. But if I could have just projected it on, and received good results; I would have because the nature of this project was to convert, not to create.
I'm kinda bummed that some people don't think this kind of project is a good idea. Cause if it received well, I was going to do other characters from the Gears Of War game. But like you said Dave, maybe I could learn more by simply using a concept rather than a finished model.
By the way, carlo_c: There actually isn't an alpha on the gun at the moment, I have yet to create that. The diffuse texture around the chainsaw is the same color as the background
Come on, man. Throw this texture away and paint it yourself. I'm sort of indifferent if this was your goal all along--you should be painting. End of story. =O
Lets go! whoooopwhoop! You can do it! Game on! etc etc etc