Diablo 3 Female Monk WiP

Millah

Hey all. I'm a vehicle/weapon artist by day, but I've been working on something else by night. I thought it would be fun to take the concepts on Blizzards site ( diablo!) and come up with what I think the female version could look like while also learning a bunch of character art pipeline stuff.. I also wanted to learn Zbrush in the process. It's been many evenings of study and work thus far, but I think I'm nearing completion for this piece for now. It still needs texture polish and the pose/rig job so far is extremely rough (especially hands). I've gotten a ton of feedback from colleagues, friends, etc. thus far and I think it's about time I put this out there for the best 3d art community there is to get some really great crits Go wild guys and gals.

1024x1024 x 3 - 1spec, 1normal, and 1diffuse(with alpha) (all diffuse is 100% hand painted. No photosourcing (I say this because I've had people ask about the cloak especially)
8,722 tri's (jeesh this is too much)

ZacD

The cloak looks really low rez, I'd try to repeat the hair and do what ever you can to give the clock more uv space.

The front bangs of the hair looks like its having issues.

c0ldhands

I agree with ZacD, he points out the same things that jumped into my eyes too. I would say some alphas for the front bangs

Gallows

There's nothing wrong with the hair model itself to me, but I'd love to see her with dreadlocks. Also superb work other than what's already pointed out. Quite a bit of tri's but there's a lot going on with this model. And you balanced it enough to keep it without seeming messy.

Millah

ZacD and c0ldhands: I'll work to ground the cloak within the overall piece some more. There's definitely something going on with my alpha within marmoset that I think I needs more work, and your calling it out just proves that to me more. Thanks!

Gallows: It's funny you mention the dreadlocks, I did a bunch of hair studies and mockup concepts before committing to the hair and a couple of them had a dread kind of look. Maybe I'll play around with that some more. And yeah, the tri's I think I will cut down especially in the drapery some more. Thank you for your kind words.

I'll hopefully get some time to work on this more tonight , if not then tomorrow for sure.

Thanks again!

Baj Singh

If you using Marmoset, you should try importing your hair as a separate mesh and changing the blending mode to alpha. Also change the option for double sided planes.

This should give you some kind of decent result.

Em.

Maybe it's just me, but from here it looks like she's suffering from a case of "the crazy eyes". Or is she supposed to look a bit posesssed(I'm being serious here, don't know if it's a class trait)? I also agree with the stuff the other said, especially the low res cloak texture.

OrganizedChaos

I'd agree with what Em. just said about the eyes, they look wide open or suprised.
Are you going to do anything with the beads? It seems like it would be nice if they had some kind of pattern or texture to them, maybe even if it was something simple like a stripe or rune.

Millah

Baj: Thanks for the marmoset tip.

Em: crazy eyes hehehe. I'll be adding that to the list of areas that need loving. Thanks for pointing that out.

OrganizedChaos: As for the beads, in all of the concept work I've found for the monk on the diablo site they've been somewhat plain. I think that their sheer scale in and of itself is somewhat eye catching, however, I can definitely see your point of maybe using them as another point of visual interest and have toyed with the idea of making them have glowing runes.

I plan on making her final pose more dynamic with her hair, beads, drapery, etc. flowing so I'll wait and see how that looks before I decide if I want the beads to pop more or not.

Thanks for the c&c!

Rhinokey

will there be a lot of extreme closeups on the head? as not it takes up more space than pretty much the whole body on the uvmap. i'm a fan of keeping the texter density uniform (cept for bits you rarely see like botom of feet and such) the cloak on the back seems weird, i can hardly tell what material it is. but overall it is nice work,

Millah

Rhino: Thanks. Honestly, the texture density of the face I purposely made higher because I thought that was what was done on many characters. I've seen many that had 1 sheet for the body and 1 for the head alone, so I kind of tried to challenge myself by cramming everything in 1 sheet. In retrospect, that might not have been the right choice. Your critique and that of some colleagues here at work has made me re-think how to manage my texture density on future characters so thank you!

Proxzee

this is looking pretty good, but everything is kinda too clean. Try using different brush textures.Also the cap is causing a lot of noise.

Rhinokey

back in the olden days it was common practice to make the head bigger whneyou had tinny texture maps, because you had to have enough to make it somewhat decent, nowdays theres plenty of pixels to go around, and sure i've seen games that use an entire 1024 for just a head.. in my opinion thats just mastabutory,

Millah

Alright, here's the update. I think I'm ready to call this done and work on something new.
- I simplified the cloak so that the low resolution doesn't read as much.
- I made a morph target to fix the crazy eyes
- I worked on the bang alpha. (FWIW I have 3 bang pieces A, B, and C. And to get them to alpha sort correctly in marmoset I have to:
1. select B and attach C. Detach C
2. Select A and attach B. Detach B
3. Select C and attach A. Detach A )

I also optimized the tri count a bit down to 7868 tris. The balls take up a heafty chunk themselves.

I finished rigging as best I could and posed her in some different action poses for the final compositions.

Below is everything, including concepts that I did early on to flesh out ideas. Renders are from marmoset









Finally, thank you to everyone who commented with critiques. There were multiple critiques that you guys provided here that I had not heard yet. Thank you!

Titus S

Oh damn... Your last post was a damn gold mine. Very nice technical thought process.

[tim and eric] Great Job! [/tim and eric]

d2king10

The first pose seems to show off a lot of the models flaws (hands, chest looks sagged, etc), however the second pose looks great (Other than the clipping).

Great work over all, and some awesome texturing going on!

ZacD

Yeah the hands and creepy and bone-y looking. Fix that and clipping and I'd call it done.