This is my current character, was given to me as a week long challenge from a friend, I'm still working on the diffuse map, thats the only map applied to the model at the moment, would appreciate critique or advice on how I can take the diffuse further, thanks!
You should smooth your nomals, dude. No one likes faceted boobies!
I think the biggest thing you need to focus/practice more is your uv mapping and texturing.
It's really hard to tell what kind of material everything is. For example the chest kinda looks like concrete and the legs look like rusted metal. This could probably be sloved with a spec map though.
Also, the hair you have on your texture sheet seems to be the same just flipped. You could just have mirrored it by stacking up your UV's and saving texture space.
Thanks for your reply, yeah I'll smooth those polys out lol, I've been trying to improve on my texturing skills mainly for this model, I've attached the image I was given about what each of the materials would be, might help a little to see what I was trying to achieve, but yeah I think ultimately adding the specular will clear things up.
As for the head, yeah I should have done that! The head had already been unwrapped for me and with a tight time limit on unwrapping the rest of it I just didn't really think of it.
Just a WIP of an arcade machine I'm working on for my own UDK mod, I'm still looking for help with this mod if anyone is interested, so far I've made all of the in-game assets so help is appreciated
This will be one of many arcade machines that I'll be making for the cinema's arcade area. Finished model coming soon, C & c welcome
Also heres an update on my engineer sculpt, almost there!
Hi everyone, heres the latest on my character, would appreciate some critique and feedback. The diffuse is esentially finished now, just going to tweak a couple of things on it today i.e fix the seams and work a little more on the face and eyes.
Just have to create the specular then ad hopefully it'll be done, if anyone see's any problems with it at this point please let me know, thanks
If you're going next-gen you should definitely take the take to add a specular map to define materials properly, everything looks uniformly plastic right now, it's specially noticeable on the face.
Also there seems to be too much lighting information baked on the texture, again specially on the face. Makes it look obviously photo-sourced and weird. Try to make materials more neutral so the lighting is defined by the environment.
Thanks for your comment, I will be adding a specular soon, and yeah I've baked an AO, cavity and used the render to texture function to create the shading too, probably did overkill there lol
Well yeah, AO is important and should definitely be present but for lighting try to leave out everything you'd expect to happen dynamically. See for example the textures from Ben Regimbal (one of my personal idols) and notice that while there is color variation on the skin there's no direct lighting baked on it.
Careful with just slapping on AO as a multiply layer. All that does is add black, making for a very "dead" looking texture. Try using it as a layer mask or a base for a gradient map - anything that lets you get some colour into shadowed areas, particularly on flesh. At the very least, tint it with a hue/sat/colour.
Cool, thanks guys, I think where I went wrong most obviously was using the bake to texture function to create the initial surfaces, I got some strong lighting from that, knew it was problem I just needed someone else to say so, so thanks! I'm working on it at the moment, will hopefully have an update later
Hey, I've created a quick spec map for now, and finished the diffuse, still messing around with the facemap for now so I won't post that until tomo. Character screens are from UDK, my computer crashes when I try and render out an high res version so I apologise for the small images.
he looks like he's holding his breath and on the brink of dying, give him some life. lol bring some color to his face!
lol I've fixed that now, should have another update on it soon, for now though I'm taking a small break and moving on, decided to go back and fix the first 3D character I ever made back in December/ January. I'm just focusing on the bust at the moment but might take it further later, not too sure yet, anyway this didn't take long and the next update will be the finished sculpt.
Until then though feel free to crit me, feedback is appreciated
Quick update on my character, decided to take it as an opportunity to do some anatomy practise, I havn't added everything yet and it's all still very rough but crits are welcome regardless
Heres some WIP screens of some touch ups I made to my old level today, after posting my portfolio here on polycount someone made me realize I'd lost my goal of creating envrionments :O I panicked and quickly went back to this today to make it good enough to go into my portfolio! :poly122:
Crits are welcome, I'm also looking for help with this mod if anyone is interested in helping, if you are let me know and I'll get back to you with more information. Character modellers, animators, coders etc are all welcome Help is needed in all areas at the moment so any help appreciated.
I'll have a few more updates soon enough, also I havn't actually fixed up the bottom right image yet, I just wanted to include it since it gives a better sense of the cinema level).
WIP of in-game character...textures look ugly now but thats only because I don't know what I'm doing with the UDK shader lol The models good, I feel the textures are getting there, been working with Mental Ray recently so I should have some nice renders with that soon for a change lol Crits good and bad welcome!
Thought I would post the head model and textures here just before I go back to working on it myself, rendered in Mental Ray, it uses the three maps shown below it. It's game res, I'm aiming for as realistic as game res can be, the head itself is 1442 polys excluding the eyes. Crits etc are welcome, excuse the eyebrows on the specular map, that was done a while back.
Head texture still looks awfully photosourced. Really, I'll say it again, look for how the great artists do it (off the top of my head Ben Regimbal or Pior Oberson), they have great texture example on their websites. It looks too bright, like the photo was shot with a flash point blank next to the person's face. Also, you should redo your specular, I'm not sure what you were trying to achieve with the fabric-like texture and honestly I can't get too in-depth in this subject cause I'm not a good texture artist myself but getting your diffuse and hue shifting it to blue can at least be a good starting point.
Thanks for another comment felipefrango, I've fixed the head texture now, I'll post an update on that soon, as for the specular I saw a model in UT3 that used the exact same technique, although only half of his face was visible so I'll imagine that was some sort of a quick solution to a specular on their side. I'll be chnaging this after considering that, thanks again, I'll try posting an update on it tomorrow.
Heres a quick update on an arcade machine I'm working on, it just has a diffuse applied at the moment, going to create a specular for it next and a glow map and then import it into my UDK game.
I think as far as this render goes, everything looks as it should, the wood looks like wood, thhe florescent lighting looks like it should and the plastic joy sticks look plastic! Crits are welcome
Cool looking arcade machine, but I have a few crits. Personally I think you might have gone a little overboard with the paint damage, try being a little more selective instead of adding it to every edge. Also, you could save a LOT of polys in this. It seems pretty low poly overall but then you have two round blue bars on top that look really dense. And there are lots of verts every where on straight lines that aren't adding to the sillouette. If you want to upload a .obj file I could give it a try and send it back to you, it'd be easier than doing paintovers.
Thanks man, yeah I'm still working on the diffuse at the moment, such as the cabinet damage. Those two blue bars at the top were just thrown in just before I took the render, I've brought the polycount down since. Thanks for the offer though
Anyway heres a quick update on the diffuse head map at the moment, I think I need to sharpen it up a little, it's looking a little washed out. I've added just the diffuse and normals for the render below, no specular yet...
I'll try finishing the diffuse up tomorrow and post an update here, in the meantime crit me! Thanks
Heres the final version of the engineer character I made for the game Praetorian Defiance. I'm calling this character done now, it's my second complete character to date and I've learned quite a bit from making this, there are a few things I'd like to fix but I think it's time to move on. C & c are welcome, thanks for reading
Heres the final version of the engineer character I made for the game Praetorian Defiance. I'm calling this character done now, it's my second complete character to date and I've learned quite a bit from making this, there are a few things I'd like to fix but I think it's time to move on. C & c are welcome, thanks for reading
Not bad dude. My only comment would be that with the textures he's looking quite flat. Maybe it needs a better AO, or just to go in with a soft brush and paint really soft shadows on an overlay layer or something.
you need to put more work in to your textures, inverting the head and tweaking it is just lazy, your sculpts are good, but the textures are just letting them down.
lighting could use work too, way too bright and it's washing out everything
BigJohn: Not too sure whether you're referring to the actual texture itself or the final render of it, I think maybe rendering it out again might help, it is very flat due to whatever setting I used at the time.
Marine: I looked at a few spec maps done for characters and they all seemed to just have a dark blue version of the diffuse, so thats what I did. I left the eyebrows black like many of them had and that was about it, wanted to do more but I'm not sure what else there is to do! I am open to suggestions though about what else I could do, anyone? And yeah the render does wash everything out quite a bit, looked ok at the time I took it *sigh* I'll try rendering out a few more soon
ViktorSan & Jungsik: The head is probably so bright compared to the body because of the shader I used for the head, might just go tone it down a little...lol
Thanks again for all the comments! Anyway heres a start I made on an Ian Mckellen portrait, did this a while back, never posted it here before, I'll be starting to work on it again from tomorrow.
For anyone interested I have a rather specific workflow for this one as I'll be making it according to MPC studios (film studio) workflow, essentially I'm going to be creating most of the detail inside Maya and getting the likeness as close as possible before even going into Zbrush, since this is apparently how they work at this studio. Several cameras have been set up all around the head mesh, each one lined up to a photo of Mckellen himself so his features are almost completely lined up by now, have a couple of areas to tweak still. Once I get to the 7,000 poly mark I'll be taking it into Zbrush to add the fine detail, then it'll be time to texture it, maybe using bodypaint 3D. This should hopefully be a high quality portfolio piece once I'm done, let me know what you think of it so far
I recommended you using a blue version of the diffuse for the reasons mentioned in the thread I linked, there are technical aspects that justify using complementary colors for non-metallic materials but still it's just a starting point. The difference is that you inverted the colors, inverting shadow information as well. The neck right below the chin is occluded on the diffuse and shows darker, but sicne you inverted it it shows almost white on the specular map, meaning that area will shine/reflect more even if the diffuse shows there's less light hitting that area. You have to learn what the spec map is really about and how it helps you define the different materials on the model.
Also, don't just blame it on the renderer/shader. You should learn to spot it and say if an image needs saturation, find the reason and fix it. If you think it's the render setup fault, fix it before you show your stuff, even cause otherwise crits will be focused on this instead of the real issues. I suggest just using a realtime shader like Xoliul's or Marmoset. Anyway, there's something really wrong with the shader, you can see on the flats that textures are more saturated than on the model, so maybe there's something funky with the shaders or the lighting.
The Ian portrait is looking good, once you put it in ZBrush and get the high frequency details going on it should look awesome, be sure to break symmetry and add some unique details to each side (always sticking to reference, of course).
don't just blame it on the renderer/shader. You should learn to spot it and say if an image needs saturation, find the reason and fix it. If you think it's the render setup fault, fix it before you show your stuff, even cause otherwise crits will be focused on this instead of the real issues.
Thanks for the response, and yeah I agree with the above, for some reason once I get a certain amount of any model I'm working on done I tend to rush the presentation of it, don't ask me why coz I do it all the time! It's a habit I'm trying to break, I must get a little impatient towards the end of a model lol
Also I was a little careless when creating the spec map, I didn't notice the neck thing until a few mins afterwards, just wanted to finish it at the time really so havn't gone back to it since, I'll try fixing it up a little later.
Anyway heres a quick model I was asked to create recently, it's a modular walkway that will be seen throughout the game I'm working on. Crits on the texture maps is appreciated, I was restricted to a tight poly count, 25 poly a piece max. Let me know what you think!
More work to come soon
Also I was messing around with trying to get a better render for the character in Marmoset, and am wandering why the textures are clipped in certain areas, particularly the arms, the UV seams are no where near there so I don't think it has anything to do with that. All I've done is export an .obj from Max, and then imported the TGA textures, I'd imagine this is a common problem, any help is appreciated Thanks
lol yeah, not sure what to blame there Oo Heres a few more things, starting with a new to old versionn of the above walkway, followed by a MR render of my engineer character, and a remake of one of my first ever props making, I've decided to make it again since I didn't know what I was doing at all when I originally made it lol
If you're having trouble with the skin, a technique that might help you is to push the contrast and the saturation way, way up and then work your way back down to a naturalistic appearance. I find that often helps me when I'm having some trouble getting a nice realistic skin tone with plenty of variance in it.
Quick sculpt, I've always wanted to make a speed sculpt and also make some sort of scary looking clown, so I'm happy I finally put some time aside to do just that! I gave myself a maximum of 2.5 hours, this is the result, would like to tidy up some areas but for now I think it looks fine. I've drawn in the hair for now but if I have time later I might develop this further. c & c welcome
$!nz: Yep, sweet tooth was an initial inspiration, I love that character!
Super Happy Cow: Why so confused??
Heres another update on the Maya sculpt for the Mckellen portrait, havn't touched those ears yet, best do that in time for my next update, c & c welcome.
I've finished with the sculpting in Maya now, can't subdivide it anymore inside of Maya so I'm thinking about bringing it into ZBrush to add fine details, such as skin imperfections, pores and fine wrinkles. C & c welcome and much appreciated, this is only a rough render btw, VERY ROUGH lol
Guy:
I think the background is clashing with your character I really like him he's just not popping for some reason. I was looking at the color choices and was wondering if you added a variation of blues to the suit if that would help It along (a faded color of a darker blue, would be a nice idea to play with.) I also see what your sort of doing there with the blue and orange since they are complimentary colors maybe playing with different color variations such as some black and orange or black and yellow or anything else than what you have currently have would push you in the right direction or a better one as far as colors go.
His skin is really pale these images, These images even though they are pale in skin tone have some vibrancy to them as if they almost "glow"(if you will) with their color try to mimic that. (I tried.)
I feel since your touching this stuff up anyway throwing in some colors wouldn't hurt just save the original play around be silly and mess shit up make silly ass color variations and you just might surprise yourself.
Thanks $!nz, yeah I'll give some colour variation a thought when texturing it again. For now I've been working on and off with the textures for this light model, thought I'd try out a few variations of the actual lights texture wise, I like the orange but it probably doesnt make much sense and would look ugly in-game lol anyway crits on the diffuse to the bottom right of the image are appreciated, I'm still working on it so comments would help nicely around now I could do with a push right now!
I actually don't mind the yellow, gives the fixture a more aged appearance which is usually what you want to do. The white fixtures make it seem as if the light is just off, which is boring. Maybe you could use both instances if it were to go into a game engine. Keep one with the white glass, and one with the yellow.
Show a little bit more metal under the paint, you started to, but why not kick it up alittle bit more.
Ok, heres a near complete version, just realized the normals for the support are messed up a little because I baked them onto a overlapping UV, and that I forgot to bake a couple of parts into the texture maps from the concept :icon15:
Anyway I'd appreciate any feedback and critique, thank you
Skuee: The lights will have some sort of animated shader once inside UDK so that it'll give the illusion of the lights being on. I added more scratches into the spec map as well
Good effort so far man, i like the guys suit and your mckellen is not a bad likeness. :thumbup:
IMO Your spec maps and diffuse maps seem too similar so i think you should develop them in tandem. The diffuse needs to be flatter, darker?
The scratches seem to be in the indented areas? how so? The edges get batterings first... so the outside of the prop seems to be unscratched as it stands and the raised parts would get scratchings first if you took a metal bar to it like a scally from Longsight, Manchester... think of real life every day examples.
At 1024 you could search a "stefan morrell tutorial on hard surface texturing" (It is legend, or should be)... and the same with the character, the spec map is the diffuse map so the texture is not quite popping like it could, just as yet. That tutorial helped me understand more on that.
Just my 2 euro cent (or 2p depending)... keep at it.
The scratches seem to be in the indented areas? how so? The edges get batterings first... so the outside of the prop seems to be unscratched as it stands and the raised parts would get scratchings first if you took a metal bar to it like a scally from Longsight, Manchester... think of real life every day examples.
Damn! Those "indents" are actually supposed to be raised parts, although now that you have mentioned it I guess it can be mistaken for both! So my question is how do I make it look as if it is a protrusion rather than an indent?? I thought I did it right, juding from the normal map I posted earlier can anyone suggest how I can increase the depth of the metal plates from the normal map or maybe suggest another way of doing this better. I used a high poly object which I baked from Xnormal to achieve the normal map...
Also because of the way the light is positioned the bottom edges I figured would be a little less scratched as it is lowered inwards allowing for the plates to be scratched a little more, thanks for your comment though, much appreciated
Replies
I think the biggest thing you need to focus/practice more is your uv mapping and texturing.
It's really hard to tell what kind of material everything is. For example the chest kinda looks like concrete and the legs look like rusted metal. This could probably be sloved with a spec map though.
Also, the hair you have on your texture sheet seems to be the same just flipped. You could just have mirrored it by stacking up your UV's and saving texture space.
As for the head, yeah I should have done that! The head had already been unwrapped for me and with a tight time limit on unwrapping the rest of it I just didn't really think of it.
This will be one of many arcade machines that I'll be making for the cinema's arcade area. Finished model coming soon, C & c welcome
Also heres an update on my engineer sculpt, almost there!
Just have to create the specular then ad hopefully it'll be done, if anyone see's any problems with it at this point please let me know, thanks
Also there seems to be too much lighting information baked on the texture, again specially on the face. Makes it look obviously photo-sourced and weird. Try to make materials more neutral so the lighting is defined by the environment.
lol I've fixed that now, should have another update on it soon, for now though I'm taking a small break and moving on, decided to go back and fix the first 3D character I ever made back in December/ January. I'm just focusing on the bust at the moment but might take it further later, not too sure yet, anyway this didn't take long and the next update will be the finished sculpt.
Until then though feel free to crit me, feedback is appreciated
Crits are welcome
Crits are welcome, I'm also looking for help with this mod if anyone is interested in helping, if you are let me know and I'll get back to you with more information. Character modellers, animators, coders etc are all welcome
I'll have a few more updates soon enough, also I havn't actually fixed up the bottom right image yet, I just wanted to include it since it gives a better sense of the cinema level).
Thanks
Heres a quick update on an arcade machine I'm working on, it just has a diffuse applied at the moment, going to create a specular for it next and a glow map and then import it into my UDK game.
I think as far as this render goes, everything looks as it should, the wood looks like wood, thhe florescent lighting looks like it should and the plastic joy sticks look plastic! Crits are welcome
Anyway heres a quick update on the diffuse head map at the moment, I think I need to sharpen it up a little, it's looking a little washed out. I've added just the diffuse and normals for the render below, no specular yet...
I'll try finishing the diffuse up tomorrow and post an update here, in the meantime crit me! Thanks
Not bad dude. My only comment would be that with the textures he's looking quite flat. Maybe it needs a better AO, or just to go in with a soft brush and paint really soft shadows on an overlay layer or something.
Good stuff though.
lighting could use work too, way too bright and it's washing out everything
I agree with the other comments... A lot of great details in the sculpts are lost on the low poly. Why is the face so bright compared with the body?
BigJohn: Not too sure whether you're referring to the actual texture itself or the final render of it, I think maybe rendering it out again might help, it is very flat due to whatever setting I used at the time.
Marine: I looked at a few spec maps done for characters and they all seemed to just have a dark blue version of the diffuse, so thats what I did. I left the eyebrows black like many of them had and that was about it, wanted to do more but I'm not sure what else there is to do! I am open to suggestions though about what else I could do, anyone? And yeah the render does wash everything out quite a bit, looked ok at the time I took it *sigh* I'll try rendering out a few more soon
ViktorSan & Jungsik: The head is probably so bright compared to the body because of the shader I used for the head, might just go tone it down a little...lol
Thanks again for all the comments! Anyway heres a start I made on an Ian Mckellen portrait, did this a while back, never posted it here before, I'll be starting to work on it again from tomorrow.
For anyone interested I have a rather specific workflow for this one as I'll be making it according to MPC studios (film studio) workflow, essentially I'm going to be creating most of the detail inside Maya and getting the likeness as close as possible before even going into Zbrush, since this is apparently how they work at this studio. Several cameras have been set up all around the head mesh, each one lined up to a photo of Mckellen himself so his features are almost completely lined up by now, have a couple of areas to tweak still. Once I get to the 7,000 poly mark I'll be taking it into Zbrush to add the fine detail, then it'll be time to texture it, maybe using bodypaint 3D. This should hopefully be a high quality portfolio piece once I'm done, let me know what you think of it so far
Also, don't just blame it on the renderer/shader. You should learn to spot it and say if an image needs saturation, find the reason and fix it. If you think it's the render setup fault, fix it before you show your stuff, even cause otherwise crits will be focused on this instead of the real issues. I suggest just using a realtime shader like Xoliul's or Marmoset. Anyway, there's something really wrong with the shader, you can see on the flats that textures are more saturated than on the model, so maybe there's something funky with the shaders or the lighting.
The Ian portrait is looking good, once you put it in ZBrush and get the high frequency details going on it should look awesome, be sure to break symmetry and add some unique details to each side (always sticking to reference, of course).
Thanks for the response, and yeah I agree with the above, for some reason once I get a certain amount of any model I'm working on done I tend to rush the presentation of it, don't ask me why coz I do it all the time! It's a habit I'm trying to break, I must get a little impatient towards the end of a model lol
Also I was a little careless when creating the spec map, I didn't notice the neck thing until a few mins afterwards, just wanted to finish it at the time really so havn't gone back to it since, I'll try fixing it up a little later.
Anyway heres a quick model I was asked to create recently, it's a modular walkway that will be seen throughout the game I'm working on. Crits on the texture maps is appreciated, I was restricted to a tight poly count, 25 poly a piece max. Let me know what you think!
More work to come soon
Also I was messing around with trying to get a better render for the character in Marmoset, and am wandering why the textures are clipped in certain areas, particularly the arms, the UV seams are no where near there so I don't think it has anything to do with that. All I've done is export an .obj from Max, and then imported the TGA textures, I'd imagine this is a common problem, any help is appreciated
Thanks for the tip Jackablade
$!nz: Yep, sweet tooth was an initial inspiration, I love that character!
Super Happy Cow: Why so confused??
Heres another update on the Maya sculpt for the Mckellen portrait, havn't touched those ears yet, best do that in time for my next update, c & c welcome.
I think the background is clashing with your character I really like him he's just not popping for some reason. I was looking at the color choices and was wondering if you added a variation of blues to the suit if that would help It along (a faded color of a darker blue, would be a nice idea to play with.) I also see what your sort of doing there with the blue and orange since they are complimentary colors maybe playing with different color variations such as some black and orange or black and yellow or anything else than what you have currently have would push you in the right direction or a better one as far as colors go.
His skin is really pale these images, These images even though they are pale in skin tone have some vibrancy to them as if they almost "glow"(if you will) with their color try to mimic that. (I tried.)
I feel since your touching this stuff up anyway throwing in some colors wouldn't hurt just save the original play around be silly and mess shit up make silly ass color variations and you just might surprise yourself.
We are still watching good luck.
Show a little bit more metal under the paint, you started to, but why not kick it up alittle bit more.
Anyway I'd appreciate any feedback and critique, thank you
Skuee: The lights will have some sort of animated shader once inside UDK so that it'll give the illusion of the lights being on. I added more scratches into the spec map as well
IMO Your spec maps and diffuse maps seem too similar so i think you should develop them in tandem. The diffuse needs to be flatter, darker?
The scratches seem to be in the indented areas? how so? The edges get batterings first... so the outside of the prop seems to be unscratched as it stands and the raised parts would get scratchings first if you took a metal bar to it like a scally from Longsight, Manchester... think of real life every day examples.
At 1024 you could search a "stefan morrell tutorial on hard surface texturing" (It is legend, or should be)... and the same with the character, the spec map is the diffuse map so the texture is not quite popping like it could, just as yet. That tutorial helped me understand more on that.
Just my 2 euro cent (or 2p depending)... keep at it.
Damn! Those "indents" are actually supposed to be raised parts, although now that you have mentioned it I guess it can be mistaken for both! So my question is how do I make it look as if it is a protrusion rather than an indent?? I thought I did it right, juding from the normal map I posted earlier can anyone suggest how I can increase the depth of the metal plates from the normal map or maybe suggest another way of doing this better. I used a high poly object which I baked from Xnormal to achieve the normal map...
Also because of the way the light is positioned the bottom edges I figured would be a little less scratched as it is lowered inwards allowing for the plates to be scratched a little more, thanks for your comment though, much appreciated