Cavern Troll - critique welcome

GarageBay9

Hey folks,

Pulled this out for a local job application (they wanted to see organic RTS-style models).

This is done to Battle For Middle Earth 2 specs - 750 faces, 512 source texture downres'd to 256, with normal. It's supposed to be a very deep-dwelling eyeless Cavern Troll, thus the large ears and vestigial eyesockets (like deep cave fish).

Original texture:



Screenshots 1 and 2 are with the 512 texture.

Screenshot 3 is with the 256 downres'd.

Screenshot 4 is 256 textures at approximate game viewing angle / zoom.


Dig in, folks, this model (and a few others) have to get me work. The only thing I'm not too concerned about are minor seams (they won't be very obvious during game play, especially once animations are added).

Jon Rush

Hey man,

This is a great attempt at a Cave Troll! I like the different surfaces that you're conveying in the texture.

On the crit side of things, the first thing that stuck out to me was the unwrap. I would have planned it a little better as to minimize those seams. Something such as making the torso and arm meshes one UV chunk would go a long ways. I realize you said you weren't overly concerned with texture seams, but they're so easy to minimize from the onset, it would have been worth your time to do so...

Also, I think you may have gotten caught up in the details a bit too quickly. I would have liked to have seen more of the large and medium sized shapes represented a bit more clearly before the skin texture. Musculature... skin folds... etc...

Also, where are those eyes! Get those to stand out a bit more, even if they're tiny. Reveals so much about a character.

I hope that helps!

GarageBay9

Thanks for the crits, Jon!

I'm semi-concerned about the spottled detail as well, it seems to kind of blot out at further distances. I was trying to match the unwrap and texturing style of the stock Mountain Troll model, which is unwrapped basically in that arrangement and has the same spottled / knobby hide. I may go back and use a tutorial I saw posted here for eliminating edge seams; I'd like to clean them up a little too. Small ones I can deal with, but the more I look at it the more I see some more significant ones.

I actually did go through and rough in some musculature along the arms and the torso. Once I started painting hues in, though, it stopped reading very well on the model. Just need more practice, I guess. (the grayscale value layer I painted for that is attached, to see what I was working with)

As for the eyes... It's eyeless, like a deep cave fish. That's why I gave it those huge ear ridges and the oversized nostrils compared to the original LoTR trolls.