jox: Definitely. Got a lot more "texture" I can put on him, he's way too smooth right now in many places (although I want to retain that smoothness here and there), just a matter of time.
Ged: Yep, that's what I've been pushing ahead with - will post more WIPs tomorrow hopefully.
i like the blue it makes the red tissue around the eyes pop really nicely.
-Woog
This. Whatever base color you choose, please play up the other colors more. Saturate the fleshy bits, do some color falloff on the extremities. . . I know you're just getting started and might have planned this, I just wanted to emphasize it since he is organic and should therefore have lots of strong color variation.
I don't know if you've decided on a colour already, but if I were you, I'd go for something like this; you'd have the dark, blueish colours around the eyes to make the fleshy bits there look good (as woogity pointed out) and you'd have the bright orange colours to draw attention to the extremities, like the crotch arms, that might otherwise not be notable enough. (I really like crotch arms).
doc_rob ... yep, I need to push it more. it has always been a problem of mine, I am not very confident with colour.
The thing that's killing me right now is how the hell do I work the polycount colours or logo into this design? I've been thinking I could throw the logo onto the cap of the lantern, but that seems a bit ... token?
what about working the logo into your pedestal, make the lantern light green; and have that illuminating some kind of plankton-like phosphoressense pedestal in the background. YOu could have booger / coral like structures growing up and glowing... And have those plankton structures forming a PC logo, or make some of them the logo.... you could have the plankton reflecting in the eyes of your crab-mob too since they are glowing, maybe the PC logo could be reflecting, but thats a bit much maybe.
thats looking really nice, wasn't expecting the blue though, imagined it like a crab, maybe you could add a gradient to it, im not sure how to put it in words, or what its called, like...sunburst.
maybe something like this:
really nice work so far, the little hairs on the legs look cool.
edit:
the eyes look really nice, cool shader.
edit 2:
actually that paint over kind of looks like a clown, but i think the initial point is visible on the large shell at the top.
Nice one Paul ! About the green, I agree with Microneezia, just add it with some glowing/magic green lighting from your lantern which could "float" a bit around the character or something. I like you color choice. The red one was also cool, though :-)
About the polycount logo, maybe put it on a object he collected on the beach and which is attached to his spear/package stuff on his back?
My point is : if it doesn't fit, don't ruin your design with it
If you're going give the lantern a green glow, why not make the flame into a kind of will-o-the-whisp greentooth? Given that it doesn't need to move you could probably pull it off with nothing more than an alpha and some effusiveness. Should add interest without drawing too much away from your overall design.
Yeah, the green just doesn't fit with this colour scheme in any way :S
Quicktime turnaround of WIP so far, including WIP base and final pose... it loses some contrast due to h264 compression unfortunately.
Just a preview spin from Max viewport, the reason the lighting is rubbish is because I have a crap graphics card here and it only supports 1 light at a time. I'll have to do some hacking and material pokery to get it looking decent in a render, cos this shader has nice rim lights and stuff which is harder to set up in mental ray.
Spam spam. Finished the lantern texture for now, may revisit later to make it pop a bit more, need to do the staff and harpoons to the same level now.
Nasty normalmap seam on the back, I'm gonna blame max's baker/viewport display for this since it's not an unusual shape. Fortunately you can't ever see it from the final pose angles, so I'm just gonna ignore it.
Managed to get the logo in there. It's pretty small in the final shot, but it's present and doesn't look too bad.
Since we're getting close to the deadline I am starting to assemble PSDs for my submission images, so I can still do some tweaks to the textures/lighting and just drop the result into the PSD ready for upload.
Here's where I'm at now for the beauty shot... or presentation shot? I forget which one is which, should check that out in the rules!
Any stuff stand out as noticeably bad and should be fixed ASAP? I can see a load of unfinished texture stuff on the main guy but I doubt I'll have time to do much fixing before tomorrow night.
Great work on this, those eyes are freaky as hell, this is what those weirdo crab monsters in Fallout3 should have looked like.
The main shell texture does feel a bit soft in areas (especially compared to the crispness of the wooden staff and leather straps), maybe slightly sharpen it up, or add a tad more texture.
I think it could do with noticeably more light bouncing of the water since you have it in there. Could work as a dramatic effect and might look good in the eyeballs as well. The lower lamp shot has a little bit of that.
On the texure I think the spec looks very toned down IMO. I was expecting a little more wetness. He looks a little too dry for his enviroment. Maybe more wetness around the eyes.
Other than that looking really good. Good luck with it.
Looks awesome MoP!! The pedestal is sweet, and the design element with the partial image in the background is great. I totally agree with bal on the textures softness though. But either way this guy has really turned out excelent.
I think this is executed to your usual level of excellence MoP, but the concept falls a little flat for me. I think many of your thumbs and previous ideas held much more promise for a stellar result. Additionally, I think the texel density on the main body seems a bit low compared to his props and gear. Most of his fine details are fuzzy and suffer from obvious filtering, whereas the gear appears to maintain pixel level crispness in this presentation. The seam/line at the hips is perfectly sharp and the result is very "video gamey" and not up to the quality of the rest of the model.
Other than that...Great work!
One more thing...
The pinkish underside of the major carapace plates appears, at least in the turnaround, to be completely devoid of detail, despite having such a large, albeit mostly obscured, surface area. This is a great opportunity to get in there with all sorts of crenelated connective tissues or something.
this is soo grand! im in love with this design. I totally want to see him crouch down and grab a fish out of that water with his crotch claws!
You should put some trash in the water, old brown bottle or a six-pack plastic holder that seagulls get around their necks. He could be cleaning that shit up actually. and when raucous college grads show up he lunges from the bullrushes tearing them limb from limb, all tha while keeping at least one eye on their women!
haZe: Yeah, I wanted to put fish in there (and in fact to also have him carrying some fish strung around on a line or something!) but I ran out of time and poly/texture budget. Shame really, it'd have been fun and I think made him more of a "character".
Bal: Cheers, I agree with the texture crits you gave - I've been spending the past couple of hours updating all his body texture, it'll be a lot more detailed, sharp and a bit rougher in the final renders.
nkoste: Yep, good call on the wetness. Again something I've tried to address in my updated textures. The lighting setup I'm using doesn't seem to accentuate the spec very well though, hopefully it will come out ok in the final renders
I actually kinda prefer how it looks using the realtime shader instead of the render, it seems to treat the spec differently but I don't have time to work out what the difference is and how to implement it in the rendered material
Maybe my other final presentation image will contain some viewport screengrabs so I can get the textures to show up better.
nrek: Thanks! Design isn't my strong point, I decided to try and keep the presentation simple and clean for this year, glad you like it.
ScoobyDoofus: Hey Ryan!
A lot of good points there. The texture resolution issues were mainly due to me being an idiot and not checking my stuff for consistency before baking - I was so eager to start texturing that I didn't notice the staff / lantern etc had a fair bit more texture space than the main guy until after I had done all my bakes. Max's AO takes long enough that I couldn't be bothered to re-bake with correct texel densities, I'm just gonna have to live with that now. Good catch on the hip seam too, I noticed that earlier tonight and I've made it a bit smoother - there is a UV seam there which I'd kinda been ignoring until this point
I think I've improved a bit of the detailing on his carapace now, you'll see when I put up the final renders tomorrow. It's kinda a last-minute rush hack (what isn't!?) but hopefully it will do the trick.
You're right, I could have got a lot more tissue detail into the soft bits, and I had big plans for them, but I just ran out of time when doing the highpoly so the stuff that came out of ZBrush wasn't quite as detailed and awesome as I'd have liked. Shame really, since I think I don't really want to revisit any of that after the contest, I just want to be done with it for now. Maybe later I'll re-polish some parts.
As for the design... well, I like it a lot better than some of the stuff earlier in this thread. I'm sure I could have taken it in a different direction and come up with something equally cool, if not better, but I like how this guy feels to me. Each to his own I guess
Microneezia, Electro: Cheers! Maybe I'll do a fish-grabbing animation after the war is over, I've got the rig all set up nicely already, it's ready to animate... I'll do some simple idle / walk / run cycles I think!
Awesome, I really like that turnaround. Agree with others on the pedestal, nice touch with the water. Personally I don't like the JJ Abrams lens flare on your presentation shot....other than that, nice work!
PS how did you create the eyes? They really have a lot of depth like real eyes.
qwik paintover. its subtle but I think you'll spot the minor changes.
I think you could get away with running your carapace normal through crazybump or something to sharpen it up. Also, I like a greener tone to the shell, personally mixed with a more magenta flesh. I've painted out the armpit seam & the hip seam.
haZe: Yeah, I wanted to put fish in there (and in fact to also have him carrying some fish strung around on a line or something!) but I ran out of time and poly/texture budget. Shame really, it'd have been fun and I think made him more of a "character".
Good thing, because I just spotted this in the rules...
No additional characters, pets, animals, pieces of characters, dead characters, etc, can be put on your pedestal. Only Bones and skulls are fine.
Might be a nice touch for after the contest in the portfolio though.
And a bonus wireframe shot, since I liked how it looked...
Phew! It's over. I don't think I'll do all that well in the judging, there is just too much amazing art being created in this contest, and I just don't get enough practise day-to-day to keep up with you guys.
I do feel quite pleased with this though, I know it's not as good as I'm capable of, but it was fun and it's turned out alright.
And I developed some useful scripts and learned a bunch of cool stuff along the way, so everyone wins, really!
Thanks to everyone who's given me feedback and encouragement, it's much appreciated. I hope I have managed to return the favour to many of you.
Great work MoP! The final shots turned out great, and that little extra time you put into the textures really show. And I must say you probably have my favorite pedestal in the entire comp .
Great work MOP - the pedestal really works well and ties everything together and helps give some more story to the character. The water effect is really nice.
This guy is a personal favourite of mine and I hope it does well.
Love the whole feel and design of the character and setting. Like you said I`m not sure what the judges might think as it might not be Dominance enough, but still I hope they take a second look and see the quality put into this work.
EDIT: And what I mean what I just said is that looking at previous years the judges seem to favour darker themes, but I might be wrong.
Replies
I like 1 and 2!
Spotted gradients and patches would be spot on.
Looks hella sweeet!
Are you planning on doing any additional Crazybump work on it?
Ged: Yep, that's what I've been pushing ahead with - will post more WIPs tomorrow hopefully.
-Woog
My personal fav-list in descending order would be 4, 1, 2, 3 .
This. Whatever base color you choose, please play up the other colors more. Saturate the fleshy bits, do some color falloff on the extremities. . . I know you're just getting started and might have planned this, I just wanted to emphasize it since he is organic and should therefore have lots of strong color variation.
The thing that's killing me right now is how the hell do I work the polycount colours or logo into this design? I've been thinking I could throw the logo onto the cap of the lantern, but that seems a bit ... token?
Here's a small update:
what about working the logo into your pedestal, make the lantern light green; and have that illuminating some kind of plankton-like phosphoressense pedestal in the background. YOu could have booger / coral like structures growing up and glowing... And have those plankton structures forming a PC logo, or make some of them the logo.... you could have the plankton reflecting in the eyes of your crab-mob too since they are glowing, maybe the PC logo could be reflecting, but thats a bit much maybe.
maybe something like this:
really nice work so far, the little hairs on the legs look cool.
edit:
the eyes look really nice, cool shader.
edit 2:
actually that paint over kind of looks like a clown, but i think the initial point is visible on the large shell at the top.
About the polycount logo, maybe put it on a object he collected on the beach and which is attached to his spear/package stuff on his back?
My point is : if it doesn't fit, don't ruin your design with it
Quicktime turnaround of WIP so far, including WIP base and final pose... it loses some contrast due to h264 compression unfortunately.
Just a preview spin from Max viewport, the reason the lighting is rubbish is because I have a crap graphics card here and it only supports 1 light at a time. I'll have to do some hacking and material pokery to get it looking decent in a render, cos this shader has nice rim lights and stuff which is harder to set up in mental ray.
Nasty normalmap seam on the back, I'm gonna blame max's baker/viewport display for this since it's not an unusual shape. Fortunately you can't ever see it from the final pose angles, so I'm just gonna ignore it.
Managed to get the logo in there. It's pretty small in the final shot, but it's present and doesn't look too bad.
It'd be damn cool to somehow capture more of that 'feel' in your stillshot.
Maybe raise the fresnel and reflectivity a bit?
Lamp looks sweet. YOu have a REALLY strong entry!
Youre texture work represents the crab surfaces perfectly!
Since we're getting close to the deadline I am starting to assemble PSDs for my submission images, so I can still do some tweaks to the textures/lighting and just drop the result into the PSD ready for upload.
Here's where I'm at now for the beauty shot... or presentation shot? I forget which one is which, should check that out in the rules!
Any stuff stand out as noticeably bad and should be fixed ASAP? I can see a load of unfinished texture stuff on the main guy but I doubt I'll have time to do much fixing before tomorrow night.
Almost there! Gogogo!
The main shell texture does feel a bit soft in areas (especially compared to the crispness of the wooden staff and leather straps), maybe slightly sharpen it up, or add a tad more texture.
Love what you did for the pedestal.
On the texure I think the spec looks very toned down IMO. I was expecting a little more wetness. He looks a little too dry for his enviroment. Maybe more wetness around the eyes.
Other than that looking really good. Good luck with it.
Other than that...Great work!
One more thing...
The pinkish underside of the major carapace plates appears, at least in the turnaround, to be completely devoid of detail, despite having such a large, albeit mostly obscured, surface area. This is a great opportunity to get in there with all sorts of crenelated connective tissues or something.
You should put some trash in the water, old brown bottle or a six-pack plastic holder that seagulls get around their necks. He could be cleaning that shit up actually. and when raucous college grads show up he lunges from the bullrushes tearing them limb from limb, all tha while keeping at least one eye on their women!
haha i love it man.
Bal: Cheers, I agree with the texture crits you gave - I've been spending the past couple of hours updating all his body texture, it'll be a lot more detailed, sharp and a bit rougher in the final renders.
nkoste: Yep, good call on the wetness. Again something I've tried to address in my updated textures. The lighting setup I'm using doesn't seem to accentuate the spec very well though, hopefully it will come out ok in the final renders
I actually kinda prefer how it looks using the realtime shader instead of the render, it seems to treat the spec differently but I don't have time to work out what the difference is and how to implement it in the rendered material
Maybe my other final presentation image will contain some viewport screengrabs so I can get the textures to show up better.
nrek: Thanks! Design isn't my strong point, I decided to try and keep the presentation simple and clean for this year, glad you like it.
ScoobyDoofus: Hey Ryan!
A lot of good points there. The texture resolution issues were mainly due to me being an idiot and not checking my stuff for consistency before baking - I was so eager to start texturing that I didn't notice the staff / lantern etc had a fair bit more texture space than the main guy until after I had done all my bakes. Max's AO takes long enough that I couldn't be bothered to re-bake with correct texel densities, I'm just gonna have to live with that now. Good catch on the hip seam too, I noticed that earlier tonight and I've made it a bit smoother - there is a UV seam there which I'd kinda been ignoring until this point
I think I've improved a bit of the detailing on his carapace now, you'll see when I put up the final renders tomorrow. It's kinda a last-minute rush hack (what isn't!?) but hopefully it will do the trick.
You're right, I could have got a lot more tissue detail into the soft bits, and I had big plans for them, but I just ran out of time when doing the highpoly so the stuff that came out of ZBrush wasn't quite as detailed and awesome as I'd have liked. Shame really, since I think I don't really want to revisit any of that after the contest, I just want to be done with it for now. Maybe later I'll re-polish some parts.
As for the design... well, I like it a lot better than some of the stuff earlier in this thread. I'm sure I could have taken it in a different direction and come up with something equally cool, if not better, but I like how this guy feels to me. Each to his own I guess
Microneezia, Electro: Cheers! Maybe I'll do a fish-grabbing animation after the war is over, I've got the rig all set up nicely already, it's ready to animate... I'll do some simple idle / walk / run cycles I think!
agreed. the eyes are killer MoP.
PS how did you create the eyes? They really have a lot of depth like real eyes.
I think you could get away with running your carapace normal through crazybump or something to sharpen it up. Also, I like a greener tone to the shell, personally mixed with a more magenta flesh. I've painted out the armpit seam & the hip seam.
Anyway, here's my final (haven't shoved the DW4/polycount logo etc onto this yet, but it's basically gonna be this):
Good thing, because I just spotted this in the rules...
Might be a nice touch for after the contest in the portfolio though.
Thumbnail:
Text:
Beauty:
Presentation:
Construction:
Textures:
Concepts:
And a bonus wireframe shot, since I liked how it looked...
Phew! It's over. I don't think I'll do all that well in the judging, there is just too much amazing art being created in this contest, and I just don't get enough practise day-to-day to keep up with you guys.
I do feel quite pleased with this though, I know it's not as good as I'm capable of, but it was fun and it's turned out alright.
And I developed some useful scripts and learned a bunch of cool stuff along the way, so everyone wins, really!
Thanks to everyone who's given me feedback and encouragement, it's much appreciated. I hope I have managed to return the favour to many of you.
grats on finishing, and best of luck!
really like studieing them, so this one goes into the ref folder like all others
lookn good man, gratz on finishing!
Oculus is the perfect name for this guy aswell!
-Woog
Love the whole feel and design of the character and setting. Like you said I`m not sure what the judges might think as it might not be Dominance enough, but still I hope they take a second look and see the quality put into this work.
EDIT: And what I mean what I just said is that looking at previous years the judges seem to favour darker themes, but I might be wrong.