Mystique
polycounter lvl 18
OK, so this was my entry for the GameArtisans.org Comicon Challenge. It's been a while since I posted anything finished in here (I'm not counting DomWar4).
The deadline for this contest is actually Monday, but I'm going away tomorrow for 4 days, so I had to get it finished tonight.
The textures and rig are incredibly rushed. The skinning is pretty dodgy but it holds up enough for these simple poses. The textures were all done in 2 nights (about 6-8 hours in total).
It's quite obvious especially on the flesh that I've had to rush this. But I wanted to submit something, even if it's not to the quality I know I can achieve. Maybe I'll revisit the texture in a week or two.
Thumbnail for the contest:
The concept was simply Mystique, in an ancient Egyptian style. No particular reason. Concept art image here.
Construction shot here. I hit 10,000 triangles on the button. Highpoly is about 2.5 million.
Beauty shot:
Presentation (front/back image):
Textures (clockwise from top left - diffuse, normals, emissive, specular. Not shown are gloss, reflectivity and opacity):
No time for a base or anything... I kinda wanted to do something Frazetta-style but again, maybe I'll come back to that later if I feel like it.
Feel free to critique. As I say, I may come back to it later to tweak stuff. Please don't mention the fact that the flesh is blurry and lumpy and has no colour variation, I know that already
Cheers!
The deadline for this contest is actually Monday, but I'm going away tomorrow for 4 days, so I had to get it finished tonight.
The textures and rig are incredibly rushed. The skinning is pretty dodgy but it holds up enough for these simple poses. The textures were all done in 2 nights (about 6-8 hours in total).
It's quite obvious especially on the flesh that I've had to rush this. But I wanted to submit something, even if it's not to the quality I know I can achieve. Maybe I'll revisit the texture in a week or two.
Thumbnail for the contest:
The concept was simply Mystique, in an ancient Egyptian style. No particular reason. Concept art image here.
Construction shot here. I hit 10,000 triangles on the button. Highpoly is about 2.5 million.
Beauty shot:
Presentation (front/back image):
Textures (clockwise from top left - diffuse, normals, emissive, specular. Not shown are gloss, reflectivity and opacity):
No time for a base or anything... I kinda wanted to do something Frazetta-style but again, maybe I'll come back to that later if I feel like it.
Feel free to critique. As I say, I may come back to it later to tweak stuff. Please don't mention the fact that the flesh is blurry and lumpy and has no colour variation, I know that already
Cheers!
Replies
Looks great, the concept is awsome.
i agree with jerry about the skin shader. feels like it needs a tighter spec. right now it looks like she has blue powder all over her (like makeup almost) because of the little specks of flakes
great one, Paul!
Haha, you're kidding? Dammit, I already submitted my finals, no going back now
I should probably have checked that ... I did read over the brief/rules again last night but didn't notice the deadline change
Edit: That's just silly, the extension post was in the General Discussion forum on GA.org, and not in the Challenges forum (where everyone's entries are)... also it wasn't visible anywhere on the main page. Bah. Dunno if I can be bothered to try and get someone to allow me to re-upload finals now.
Atm only the textures bother me. They don´t have a lot of punch, especially the skin, like the other said.
the "crust-patches" look pretty equal in hue and spec value, compared to the mystique from the movies:
http://www.acidemic.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/mystique.jpg
eventually give the spec map a bit noise, so it gets the bit sprinkly effect, and tighten the spec a bit on the bare skin parts.
I wish I had found out about the deadline extension earlier, haha!
If I wanted to do this properly, I'd do the "scale" effects on the skin in ZBrush and bake it all out. It's harder to control the results of the NVidia filter, and it takes longer. A nice alpha and lazymouse in ZBrush would make all those patterns a quick job indeed, and would mean I could paint across UV seams.
I might even do a complete polypainted texture when I get back, and use ZMapper to get some extra detail in there, I have a feeling it would come out looking a lot nicer.
I love the idea too. Very nice bakes and textures. I really loved this competition too, so many good pieces came out of it.
The form of the body is really solid, really strong forms. Only exception i'd think would be the hands. The knuckles all seem to "fall in a line," when the hand bones should slightly vary in length some. I notice it more in the front-on shot, with her hand holding the dagger.
one trick you could try to add some slight variation and "body" would be to add a 50% gray layer @ overlay and put color noise in it. Set that bad boy to like 2 or 3%, duplicate it, flip it H and V, blur it, and set it to 4 or 5%. It is very subtle, but adds some really nice variation and has a weird way of making surfaces feel more cohesive.
I think you may be restricting yourself a little much with the cloth as well, with the darks added in there. Keep it flat & even! let the lighting and normals do the work!!!
Should try some complimentary colors in the skin/flesh stuff in spots. not sure how well it'd come out, but could have some cool effects in thinner skin areas.
cool stuff mang, cant really tell the texture was done in a night, but could definitely push some more with it in the future. The gold, metals & leather came out great!
really digging the jewelry too, 'cept her necklace seems a bit "flat"
Also there's a large amount of space between each finger that I need to sort out in the lowpoly.
P442: Ueah, it's just mapped onto a plane, and the texture is just solid colour fills, heh.
i really wondering how you did them work so neat.
For your next try, I'd work a bit more on the presentation as well. Try to maybe separate the character more from the background. It's maybe my screen, but everything is "blending together" a bit to much from here. She also deserves a cool little padestal! and some subtle smoking/post effect stuff, you know
good work !
Don't know if I'm asking something that shouldn't ever be requested, if that's the case, disregard it, but could you please show a wire with the rig? It would be much appreciated, since I end up to employ a lot of stretching bones to make it look right and skinning becomes a very long process.
Thank you and good luck for the competition!
I am still not happy with the texture on her skin. I didn't spend long enough tweaking it (spent half of the extra time on making the base, tweaking the render setup, fixing skinning weights and stuff).
Partly because I was scared to open the PSD, it's not hugely organised since most of it was rushed, and my computer is really starting to show its age now, it can barely handle a 2048x2048 PSD with a hundred or so layers. Really chugging and slow, took about 2-3 minutes just to save the file... and redraw is dreadfully slow too. I need to buy a new PC.
I took a screengrab of the shaders I was using to preview (Crazybutcher's port of Brice's BRDF shader, with a couple of minor tweaks of my own), again my PC showing its age - I don't have a shader model 3.0 card, so I can only display one light in the viewport, and couldn't get the viewport shadows working for this shader either.
So yeah. I may re-revisit this model once I upgrade to a computer that will handle all this stuff without limiting me or frustrating me immensely.
Cheers for all the feedback so far, it's dead on for the most part, and I'm well aware I didn't cover it all in my updates, which is a pity. Once again I'm certain I can do better than this... just a matter of time which I don't have right now
'Night!
Did you pull the hair spec back some too? looks softer & nice.
cool finished piece, glad you took a lil time to get back to it, every little bit helps
those renders in updated first post are top notch. good luck!
-Woog
Cheers Swizzle, your guy came out really well too
Actually I started out having more spec on the scales, but since their diffuse was darker, the overall effect ended up making her skin look really uniform (darker diffuse + lighter spec = similar end result), so I toned down the spec in order to pop the contrast. On reflection it might have been better to just up the spec amount on ALL of the skin to get a bit more shine anyway. Now that I look at some stills, Rebecca Romijn was really quite shiny in the movies.
Hah, yes, totally agree. I tried gradients, flat fills, all sorts of colours and shades and just couldn't find anything which worked well
It was always too light or too dark, too saturated or too grey, or just weird. I dunno what I was playing at. Ideally I think I'd have modelled some more scenery and had a subtle stone wall texture in the background, I think that'd have worked best. Oh well.
Cheers for the crits and feedback everyone. Good solid stuff
Btw what graphics card do you have on your pc? I don't have shader model 3.0 either (Geforce 4200), but I'm going to upgrade to a GeForce 7600 (because I only have a ye olde AGP slot).
I haven't done any animation in a long time (and I was never very good at it), so I thought I should get some practise in!
Quick test animation tonight - VERY WIP!
http://www.greveson.co.uk/comicon/mystique_walk_wip_01.avi
1.4mb, XViD codec.
Just viewport animation preview with shader and default light.
Known issues:
- Arms are jerky, not smooth
- Toes aren't animated
- Hands haven't been touched
- Cloth hasn't been touched
- Pelvis motion needs more "pop" on hitting the ground, too smooth right now
I thought it might be worth putting up for now though. Any other issues people notice? Will probably post an update tomorrow night.
I'd be curious to see the character rendered using mental and/or marmoset
great job !
My biggest crit is that the face is too dark in the diffuse map, she kind of gets lost. If the eyes weren't so bright, it might be ok, but the eye has too much trouble adjusting from that bright intensity to then take in the dark intensities. I'd probably dim the eyes a tad, and brighten the face diffuse a bit.
Excellent work though.
*edit* something like this: http://www.poopinmymouth.com/net/pcount/mop_mystique_po.jpg Though I would have arranged the lights a little differently to work with this setup. I basically tried to emulate some blueish shade hitting her lower half, and some brighter warm sun hitting the upper half. I would have used a tight spot on just the face, arranged in a broad portrait angle, and also used a hot warm rim to help pull in the outdoor/egyptian theme.
Just for fun I have started an alternate texture - just a basic egyptian lady!
Updated the animation and showing the new texture, 1mb XVid file:
Be aware, NSFW, boobs!
http://www.greveson.co.uk/comicon/mystique_walk_wip_03.avi
I remember seeing the hipoly model before and it was badass but matching the diffuse is problematic because in the movie they got around it by its animation revealing its porcupine like surface and thus explaining why when static it was so dark as to be near unreadable.
The movie also placed her in dark scenes or with rim lighting often so we could pick out her forms, so you background scene being lit like a nighttime scene may be an option.
Soft lantern bounce light with the the moon providing your rim and ambient light on the blue end of the spectrum to complement the blues of the characters skin tones.
Good luck man, this is a tough one, but not I think through your own efforts as much as through trying to be too respectful to a flawed source!