You've got the basic down, now you need to learn to step up into more advance low poly techniques. It's not all about solid meshes, it's smoke and mirrors to trick the eye into believing it's seeing something more detailed that it is.
Your character is very boxy a few reason:
1) you modeled everything as a box instead of a diamond. While this can be a personal style/preference, rotating a box 45 degrees tends to trick the eye into believing the shape is round.
2) Having no smoothing groups reveals every edge and polygon of your model, breaking the illusion, and making babies cry.
3) No taking advantage of transparent materials
The hat for example, you used 8 sided, so your polygons are all obvious. 12 sided would have only added 4 triangles to your scene, yet appear much more round. On the other hand, an alpha of a circle on a plane looks even MORE round and less triangles than both. http://img265.imageshack.us/img265/5525/monhelpbd6.jpg
4) Not reusing UVs for things that are the same, as in the wraps about arms and legs are the exact same thing. They should be using the same UV space to allow more room for others. There are other areas that can use this.
Edit...
I agree with you about the diamonds looking rounder than boxes, I made this mesh b4 seeing http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=55266
after seeing that post i started on mortimer... mortimer looks better I think, but still his face could use work, cholden do u have any ttips for unwrapping heads? or anything else that could help?
also i have a portfolio of my college work if you would like to see it and could give me some information as to how to go about building a better portfolio.
534
Replies
Your character is very boxy a few reason:
1) you modeled everything as a box instead of a diamond. While this can be a personal style/preference, rotating a box 45 degrees tends to trick the eye into believing the shape is round.
2) Having no smoothing groups reveals every edge and polygon of your model, breaking the illusion, and making babies cry.
3) No taking advantage of transparent materials
The hat for example, you used 8 sided, so your polygons are all obvious. 12 sided would have only added 4 triangles to your scene, yet appear much more round. On the other hand, an alpha of a circle on a plane looks even MORE round and less triangles than both.
http://img265.imageshack.us/img265/5525/monhelpbd6.jpg
Look at josh singh's low poly werewolf, and how he handled the fur around the head. You should be doing the same thing.
http://www.joshsingh.net/images/comp_sheet.gif
4) Not reusing UVs for things that are the same, as in the wraps about arms and legs are the exact same thing. They should be using the same UV space to allow more room for others. There are other areas that can use this.
And your homework assignment is studying his, and b1ll's low poly work
http://www.joshsingh.net/
http://www.benregimbal.com/
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=56881
Edit...
I agree with you about the diamonds looking rounder than boxes, I made this mesh b4 seeing http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=55266
after seeing that post i started on mortimer... mortimer looks better I think, but still his face could use work, cholden do u have any ttips for unwrapping heads? or anything else that could help?
also i have a portfolio of my college work if you would like to see it and could give me some information as to how to go about building a better portfolio.
http://www.tsumea.com/user/jadedbuddha/journal
[ame]http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=m4y3lgl7WTw[/ame]
once again thanks for the help.