Strider (image heavy + nudity)

kanga

No more nudity,... hit the back button !

Hi

Just finished the game character workshop with Jon Rush. I thought I would post the story. The workshop was really amazing and if you are interested in making game characters I would recommend it highly.

The project Jon had us doing was a redesign of a character from the old console days. The character had to have a twist as well. I picked Strider Hiryu, and made him a woman The object of the excersize was to redesign, model and transform a character into a format that next generation games could use. We used a low poly cage and mapping techniques to approximate the high poly design.

Above is the breakdown.

kanga

Here are some mental ray renders. Still working on the platform.


For those who hate renders some viewport captures.

kanga

I painted my zbrush uved meshes in polypaint 3.5 and the exported maps for baking in max transferred straight over to my decimated zbrush uved high poly references in max. All maps 2048.

Normals

Occlusion which some of you guys here helped out on,... thanks again!

Diffuse

Specular colour

kanga

To start off with we had to do some quick design sketches and these are mine.

We had to do some quick design sketches and these are the ones I came up with.

No one liked the winged hat so I had to put the twist somewhere else. The second concept got through. I have always been a big fan of the muscle suit because it adds really nice form reinforcement, and looks cool Hiryu does a bit of flying so I thought I would play on that as well.

kanga

Next it was into max to make a stub mesh for the sculp. I cheated a bit because I wanted to have a character with a mouth. I thought I would go all out so I had to put in a few extra edge loops then you see here.

I also put in a couple for the eyes as well.
Here is the first rough sculpt.

I have no idea why but I tend to over muscularize. Also you can see the jaw is pretty Arnold like.

kanga

Doing the costume and attributes went more in tandem. I blocked in the clothing and the main mechanicals, Just to get an idea of volume and if the design would stand up. I pushed out the suit to the limits of where the muscle straps should be so you see she is looking sturdier. I liked the idea of flight so I put in some extendable wings. That meant a head brace, exo spine to take the stress and a couple of jet thrusters. I also wanted to look at the silhouette moving, or at least rotating.

The flv (6mb) is here
If you can see the flv here are some picd.

kanga

Onto refining the sculpt. I got the feeling that the figure was too chunky and had some misgivings about the femaleness of the character. I wanted her to have asian eyes and some oriental features, but even if she wasn't going to be a ninja in the classic sense I did want some catlike lightness, because as we all know ninjas rely on reflexes and inner strength

The jaw is still quite heavy and the face is pretty muscular.

Still too beefy!
About this time I really hacked into the body and brought it back to something finer. I also pulled the jaw back and rounded it off. Jon suggested dropping the cheek bones which helped I think no end!

kanga

Onto the suit in 3dsmax with some helmets and bio bugs Notice the tractor version with the nifty tread.

A pretty high density retopo of the skin parts.

kanga

I started blocking in the rest of the costume. You can see she is pretty light so I am hoping the suit will fill her out a bit.

Ninjas

hmm, the techincal execution is solid, but it doesn't read to me as Strider or even ninja-like-- it is more like a superhero.

kanga

Onto the main suit and I drew the poly tracks on the sculpt so that I could use the retopology feature in zbrush to put in the geometry I wanted to extrude out in 3dmax later. I saw this on Vadim's vids and I don't think he would mind me using the method

With the shell done, into max.

Quite a bit of tweaking because if the verts are just a little bit out they scream!

kanga

Jumping back and forth seems to work pretty well.

Oh yeah,... forgot about the mouth it's been in there the whole time. You can see that the lips are slightly parted in most of the models. A quick look in zbrush. I thought they were kind of small so I sized them up a bit.

kanga

More work on the suit.

Working on down some possible spine, sword and booty alternatives.

kanga

Ok the whole shee bang into zbrush. We were going to bake in max so I needed some decimated reference from the high poly model. I held onto my heart because I thought the suit would shrink and my computer would explode. Turns out it wasn't as bad as I feared. Notice I traded the rockets in for weapon holders. The rockets made her look like a Mountie.

Just when you think you are there,... you find out you are not! Jon said something about finishing off the shoulder area and I made a quick paintover. Indeed it looked way more balanced, so back into max.

Erwin, one of my fellow classmates thought it would look cool if you could see layers under the plates so I tried that.

kanga

Ok so Strider Hiryu has to have a weapon. I never played the game but I watched people do it on the web for this workshop and found some info on it:

Hiryu uses a "Cipher" (a razor-sharp blade, wielded similarly to a tonfa which generates metal-cutting plasma) called the "Falchion". Throughout the course of the game, the player can obtain power-ups, including an extension power-up for the Cipher (increasing Hiryu's attack range for the next few attacks).

So the sword he is using is pretty special. I think design wise the Japanese swords are probably the best, they are light and efficient and have a lovely form. However in this case I didn't think it would go well with the industrial military Armour of this character, there would be no balance. I imagine those swords to go really well with a very handsome character in a long coat. So I opted for a sabre with twin scopes on top to shoot with (cannons). Hopefully it is bulky enough for the figure and souped up enough to look interesting.

kanga

Ninjas wrote: »

hmm, the techincal execution is solid, but it doesn't read to me as Strider or even ninja-like-- it is more like a superhero.

Hi Ninjas (with a name like that you cant be fooled )
Yeah you are absolutely right. That would have been a really good direction to go in. When I look at the original pixel art the character isnt very ninja like, but I could be missing it. This is really a folio piece so I wanted to make it difficult in that I wanted the face to be young, female, pretty (as possible) and visible. Also I wanted to push the armour to the max. If I were doing a Nija character I would cover the face and make the armour really tight,..... and BLACK, with blue spec.

Thanks for your reply.
Cheers

kanga

Time is almost up. Now comes the really hard bit. The low poly cage. I thought: 'how hard can this be, there arnt that many polys?'. I was wrong! You have to keep the outline of the character in 360 degrees in all direction, have enough polys to support details but not too many to kill the mapping, the seams have to go in the right place, the mesh has to penetrate the right way, you have to be able to deform the mesh properly for animation later, and you have a budget. Its a balancing act. I'll show you some of my failed attempts because I made about 5 of them. Then I changed things later on so I got pretty comfortable with altering the cage and keeping the majority of my uv's.

Too many.

Too few (head bang)!

Strange belly!

Getting there with the right bits detached.

kanga

On to uv's
Everyone has their own way of doing these and I did the uv's for this cage in Modo and Headus. I like Modo because it is a modelling app and it allows you to edit your mesh along with the uvs, up to a point. Headus only does uvs so you have to go back and forth a bit but it makes uvs fun, it also has a brilliant relax. One thing to watch out for are t-verts. You can check for these in max's xview or if you havent got max there are other apps that will do it but my advice is to get rid of them.

On to baking.
I split my mesh up and deleted the right and left leg on the low poly mesh which is what you can see in the uv windows above. You cant bake out normal maps with copied uvs sitting on top of each other so all the maps have to be baked out with no other parts of geometry present. After everything is done then you can copy the parts and flip them. The mesh here is sitting on top of the high poly which gives artefacts at bake time. The mesh should be going through the reference mesh. It cost me a lot of time to learn that lesson.


And that's about it. Hope you liked it.

Cheers

whats_true

I think your specular color could use some better contrast and hot spots. Seems far to clean.

Great workflow. Reminds me a lot of Crysis character, but the female version.

kanga

whats_true wrote: »

I think your specular color could use some better contrast and hot spots. Seems far to clean.

Great workflow. Reminds me a lot of Crysis character, but the female version.

Thanks man. The specular is sucking,...... heavily, loads more to do on it! Will take your advice.

I really love the nano suit too

Cheers

fearian

Nanosuit exoskeletons are in this year! Great result, and thanks alot for posting the workflow!

kanga

Cheers fearian, glad you liked it.

Yeah they will probably become nono suits

malcolm

I came in here looking for nudity, where is it?

kanga

malcolm wrote: »

I came in here looking for nudity, where is it?

Dang,... not the nudity you are used to?

katana

This was a great thread. Nice workflow and thanks for showing of your project. Do you think animating that mesh with all the attachments will be a problem?

BHJ

I really enjoyed going through your posts and looking at the workflow, especially parts where you show what went wrong and how you corrected it.

I'd really like to see the Spec and Diffuse pushed to a whole other level though. I think she is coming across as quite flat currently, and some extra hours slogging on these could make good piece great.

Thanks for sharing.

kanga

katana, thanks man. The only part that is a bit tricky is the shoulder pads. If I were to do this again I would split that part into 2 pieces joined by a flexible bit so that the part on top of the shoulder and the piece near the bicep are independent.

BHJ glad you liked it. I think she is a bit flat too. Just finishing of the platform and will jump into the maps. Thanks for the advice.

Cheers

Adam L. Gray

Just quickly looked through the whole thread here, and



that is all

Or, well. The crysis'ish body armor felt slightly annoying to look at at times. Due to all the lines shooting everywhere. But, that's a minor thing imo.

kanga

Tiros, thanks for the reply!

Is less than three?

The suit is busy, I suppose colour allocation could calm it down and still keep it interesting to look at.

Cheers

Adam L. Gray

Nah, by I mean that I love it

kanga

Hey Tiros,... there was something wrong with my math

Thanks man.

kanga

Hi hi,... bandwidth limit exceeded, 5 gig per month.

Pics will be up again tomorrow.
Thanks for looking.

Cheers

Slash

I too was lured in by the promise of nudity. I was disappointed. But i enjoyed watching your progress! If i were to give any crits i'd say work some more on the face, smooth out some features. The pictures where gone when i refreshed, so i don't have it in front of me right now, but i think the face could do with some gentler features, and more attention put into the shape of the face. Right now her face looks a little like a 90's prerendered cinematic, if that makes any sense..

kanga

Hi Slash, sorry about the naked warning, it wasnt to get you in, it was to stop your boss being offended if you have one.

Thanks for the reply and the direction. My characters have pretty strong features and they could sure use refining. To tell the truth this model is driving me nuts and I am trying hard to finish it. To get in now and alter the head, repaint and rebake the maps would be the death of me I find the biggest personal challenge is to make young pretty faces, male or female. I am busy with a new character and am doing just what you say, I am really putting a lot of effort into the face, I just want it young and attractive.

I would like to post the new wip here and hope you will help out with it. Makes perfect sense what you have written,I agree

Thanks again and cheers.

kanga

Sorry I had to pull most of the images because my bandwidth was taking a beating. Only an hour after the new monthly quota 5% was gone and since I am a freelancer I need my site. So thanks to all those of you who kindly left comments and I hope some of you got something out of the story.

Cheerio Chris

kanga

Time to spam the thread!
Its done,.....

I didnt think it was possible to get this much getail out of a low poly.

Cheers

raiskul

I can't see any of the images >_>

kanga

Can you see the image above your post?
Above that is the reason the other images are offline.

Cheers

achillesian

wheres the nudity, what is this bait'n switch?

no pun intended

kanga

when the pics were up the title was for people who work at the christian brothers studio (dont laugh it exists). You dont want your boss seeing titties now do ya?

rawkstar

where's the nudity?

/demand?

kanga

You guys dont have the party channel do ya ?

raiskul

I can't see any images nudity or pg

achillesian

can i post nudity?

kanga

Thanks for the bumps chaps, you guys are great

Jon Rush

Hey man - that turned out looking pretty cool! Glad you dug the class

Do you have a larger image of the beauty shot?

kanga

Jon Rush wrote: »

Hey man - that turned out looking pretty cool! Glad you dug the class

Do you have a larger image of the beauty shot?

Yeah,... I have been pimping your workshop all over the place You should be busy for a couple of thousand years!

Yeah I have bigger images of both,.... but they are on my week day workstation, will post them here when I get back home.

Cheers Jon
Nice hat.

kanga

Trying to organize more bandwidth and it is like pulling hen's teeth atm I am afraid.
DANG!

SHEPEIRO

nice character but i think your renders are not doing you any favours, to be honest im getting an early 90s pre-rendered box art vibe from it, mostly due to the lighting and material/texture i think. The lighting is monochomatic try a more interesting set-up with a colour fill light and an accentuated rim light, and there doesnt seam to be much in the way of texture detail, or fine detail, the materials look do not have dffinition, she looks like shes completely made from rubber.

kanga

SHEPEIRO wrote: »

nice character but i think your renders are not doing you any favours, to be honest im getting an early 90s pre-rendered box art vibe from it, mostly due to the lighting and material/texture i think. The lighting is monochomatic try a more interesting set-up with a colour fill light and an accentuated rim light, and there doesnt seam to be much in the way of texture detail, or fine detail, the materials look do not have dffinition, she looks like shes completely made from rubber.

Ok, I am pretty much struggling with the textures and will play some more with the lighting. I think the occlusion on the face may be too harsh as well. I will try to get rid of the rubber.

Thankyou very much for the advice!
Cheers

whats_true

Your letting your occlusion do ALL of your texture work. You need to give it more love. Define the materials you are given, add some wear and tear, desaturations and color variations within the same color sphere. Occlusion gives it the depth, now give it the feel.