red eclipse character wip

planaria

Update :
Low Poly 3d-coat auto topology test

starting work on texture phase, high poly poly painting to bake down to low poly diffuse texture.





High Poly :




hi there,

a friend of mine coerced me into helping out a free open source game called red eclipse
http://www.redeclipse.net/

there concept art was not very good so i'm going to try and make the thing from scratch within whatever artistic constraints they throw up along the way. then it will be time to actually model/texture/animate it.

heres the first bit of concept art, some quick head concept brainstorms.



hoping polycount can help me out with getting this to look as nice as possible, thanks!

Will Faucher

I really like 1,3, and 8. 5 is nice, but it lacks a little silhouette.

Nistrum

hey man. nice start, i gotta say though. be careful about making him too like master cheif..

OMGod

I like 3, 4 and 8 the best.

JamesArk

Nistrum wrote: »

hey man. nice start, i gotta say though. be careful about making him too like master cheif..

Gotta agree with this.

I personally like #6 the most probably because it's so different than the circular-based heads.

planaria

ok so talked to quite a few people and also the devs and decided to work on some torso variants that depend on the specific head.



i totally agree with the "stay away from halo" comments, ill do my best with that one.

thanks again for the input!

Will Faucher

Ohh I like 3 alot! However, 2 looks very outlandish. I like it as well! 2 is just something you don't see often.
Of both 2-3 however, 3 seems like the most heroic of the 4.

[SF]Three9

Prophecies wrote: »

Ohh I like 3 alot! However, 2 looks very outlandish. I like it as well! 2 is just something you don't see often.
Of both 2-3 however, 3 seems like the most heroic of the 4.

^^^nothing more nothing less

mifflefish

Out of them all I would have to say 4 is the least interesting. The rest of them are very nice, though if I had to pick a favorite it would have to be 3. Can't wait to see them in 3d, keep it up.

OMGod

Most definitely 3, but if there's a second character you design then it should look like 2, as he looks like an absolute beast of a character.

kaptainkernals

I quite like 3.

1 looks like some kind of gundam robot.

2 needs a heavier body for that helmet, it feels a little unbalanced in terms of weighting, simply as 2 by the helmet, and hunched shoulders looks like it would be a heavy character.

4 reminds me quire a bit of dead space, the almost segmented back part, and the 4 eyes slits.

planaria

ok the legs could have come out a little better.. but oh well here they are.



my eyes just stopped working at a certain point, any faults are because of that!

Ahuri

The n°1 is the lighter and I like it!
Love the white node on the top of the leg. It gives a great look to the figure!

StevenEgan

I like 1 best. Cool concept sketches.

J-kid

I think you should go with 3 or 1 for the legs

dansher

i like the stream line look of number one

r_fletch_r

3 looks awesome. id say though that in sihlouette it reads the same as a taurian for mass effect

OMGod

I think 1 or 3 would look the best.

[SF]Three9

throwing out the only vote for 2, i love large feet armor and large gauntlets :x

Sandro

Reminds me saren from mass effect

I like second one.

First has sleek look suitable for feminine characters. Third one has too big butt and forth one has heavy legs compared to upper body.

None of them are bad, depends on overall style of game/type of character.

Sukotto

I vote for 2!

1 and 3 are nice but are a little boring to me. 4 looks like Gears of War legs

Will Faucher

I like 1 and 3. 2 looks like he is wearing bellbottoms. :P

Isaiah Sherman

Kind of boring, reminds me of Mass Effect + Halo with some Gears of War boots. Such is the nature of sci-fi concept art. The level of execution is fine, but the concept itself needs something to make it stand apart from every other sci-fi game.

planaria

So the guy paying me to actually do this is going to go with #2 so thats what i'm going to go with. The model does look a lot like something from the mass effect universe. during the zbrushing process i will be doing my best to at least make it not look like one of those aliens, i think the main point there is just not to make the head look like one of those aliens, after that people shouldn't notice too hard.

thanks for the input its invaluable.

planaria

havent worked in zbrush in a while so im focusing on a practice head that i will then later slap stuff ontop of to make the actual head for this mode.

Still heavily wip, i need to mess around with the forms of it a bit to have more variance and contrast to them i think. in the end no one will probably see any of this mostly just testing things, but still its fun to see where you can go with something.

Torrrtilla

I like where this is going! I think the density of detail on the top of the head is too high and uniform. It looks less like machine and more like messy wrapping paper.

planaria

you beat me to the punch tortilla, anyways was good motivation to see how i could break that detail up.

still sortof searching for what looks best, and what concepts i should propogate and which ones i should cut back on.

OMGod

I really like the new head sculpt; so what kind of creature is this going to be? Is it going to be some sort of a futuristic human/cyborg thing or what? Sorry if it was already mentioned somewhere here or at the Red Eclipse site, but I didn't see it. Can't wait to see this textured.

woogity

1 also i think it has already been brought up but be careful with so much detail, you dont wanna lose that in your maps or end up with it being too noisy.

planaria

super rough draft, mostly was seeing how much i could follow the concept and still maintain some semblence of a decent model.

basically just cloned the head and smooshed and smashed my why to this, will definitely have to retopo this sucker but before i do that im trying to get the most out of what i have first.

planaria

still roughing forms out...

HughieDM

What brushes do you use to get the forms your getting
and great work I really enjoy your shapes and forms

OMGod

I really like where this is going, can't wait to see the shoulders and chest get added in eventually. The only thing I'm a little confused about is where the eyes are going. If they're going in the inlets on the sides, I think they're too far from the center/spread out, but idk just my opinion.

planaria

still need to refine the head further, there are ccd eye cameras in the front , and then there will be some on the side, there all meant to give the wearer a complete view not from one but the aggregate of all the camera inputs.

as for brushes i use a loott of trim dynamic, dam standard, clay , and clay tubes. with various custom settings on each.

Will Faucher

Loving the shapes! Just be careful not to go overboard with too much detail. It tends to get noisy very quickly.

Fireflights

Agree'd with the comments about avoiding too much detail. I like this last one a lot better. For my personal tastes, it's bordering on being a bit too complex...I think the additional stuff on the neck could be a huge contributor. There's nowhere for the eyes to "rest", because overall the entire form is so uniformly complicated...there's not much of a focal point in the design.

One of the reasons I think that this one works better than the last is that you've got a better distribution of large vs. small shapes. It's also got a more unique silhouette. I'd suggest that you try to avoid adding much more to this one. :P

Reaper1993Reaper

How did you do that?

Alberto Rdrgz

definitely agree with prophecies, but I would say that it's a little to close to overboard... it's real busy, seems like it's missing a focal point to draw the eye. Great shapes nonetheless!

planaria

found out some fun stuff with zbrush, first off there reprojection stuff sucks for getting the detail back to your retop'ed mesh.

the main thing i noticed is that when you make a really low detail retopo mesh in zbrush it will tend to get a lot of errors during reprojection. also zbrush didnt seem to like that i was trying to capture mesh data from two different meshes in the reprojection.

anyways i read through a lot of posts regarding this, one interesting note is that the retopo reprojection is more error prone then the subtool reprojection(wtf?). played around with zproject also and found a possible bug wherein if you use symmetry both symetry points will project to the same point (not good), also zproject takes a lot of finess to get right. then it occured to me, highly detailed retopo meshes tend to much less errors when reprojecting so why not just use decimation master?

I ended up making a 10k decimated mesh, and then finally used this to reproject. this gave me a much more optimized mesh with much better poly distribution, decimation master's only real problem is it produces only or seemingly mostly triangles instead of quads so at lower detail levels you get some ugly artifacts, at higher detail levels what mattered more to me was accuracy, and decimation master gives that. still havent thought of a good clean way to get reprojection to work with multiple subtools, maybe zb4?

so the head is pretty much done, or is it ? you be the judge! i figure if i try to move on now as opposed to making it perfect i wont detail it any more then it already is.

planaria

first stab at the torso.. it .. looks like a sea horse ?

planaria

teeny tiny update.. working on the torso still

i think i need to skip two levels to get the torso nice and dense and then just work on really refining each shape in the torso. as it stands i can still see areas that i will have to go over and refine yet again because i was too conservative with how many levels i went up with in the subdivision. its a hard habit to break, usually i want to go up level by level slowly adding detail but with the trim brush it makes way more sense to maybe set the shapes in a lower level and then to just shoot up.

then again slow cooking can be good too?

planaria

ok so, got some time last night to work on the torso, then this morning i cleaned it up a little more. it could still use some loving but might move on to the legs or arms first and then do a tlc pass once its all done.

thoughts?

c0ldhands

Dont know, the armor seems more like its composed of rocks than hardsurface plates. Not a big fan of the overpolpulated details but of course the design still has a bit of way to go I would say. You should focus on nailing the hardsurface feel before you go nuts with nano details.

planaria

alright trying to clean this up a bit ,, the torso is definitely starting to be unfun , and im running out of ideas on it bah !



thoughts ? paintovers? ideas of which parts to change?

planaria

coldhands, which areas of the body stand out to you as the most rock like, is it that some elements protrude too far or what ?

to me the butt area looks the most 'metallic' so maybe its more about having less pronounced protrusions ?

woogity

is this meant to be an armor or a robot? because if its armor i would suggest sculpting a basemesh of whoever will be inside to get your proportions right, before jumping into the hard stuff.

planaria

its meant to be an android,

i used this reference for the body proportions

se7ered

i loved his super detailed face. creeeped me right the &%@# out

planaria

so im totaly burnt out on the torso for the moment, im going to move onto other parts for the time being.

very rough blockout of the arms, legs. just took an older model's stuff and threw it in there and killed the higher levels.

the character is supposed to be agile so interpret that as you will.

polozad

Good shapes, really. But I don't like the whole silhouette, and, I think you need to simplify some parts/forms. Excessive uniform detalization erase any emphasis, and the whole model becomes faceless. IMO, of course.

Illusive

this is looking awesome so far i can't wait to see it finished