Haha yes I know it's been dragging on. I sorta wish I could change the thread title since it's not really even about the face anymore.
The checklist is now:
Coat/Shirt/Sleeves
Final assessment and touch ups
Color!
Final Final Assessment and more touch ups.
Accessories (Not pictured) which includes:
-Bandoleer
-Backpack
-Wepon
Sleeping Roll
-????
-Profit
I'm also considering alternate heads.
Also after doing this I feel confident enough to do the next one in color from the get go. I learned a lot about light and shadow and I'm glad I did it in B/W.
BIG EDIT: My friends have been calling me out on his anatomy and proportions a lot. I -want- him to look hand painted, semi cartoony, far from realism like say HL2 male_02 or whatever model. In terms of mainstream games, like say... Torchlight. Torchlight is a really good example.
The Alchemist and Warrior are both five heads tall, the Rogue and that second concept peasant are six heads. My model is roughly five/half heads tall, and that head has been shrunk repeatedly because people saying it looked too huge, even though I was trying to make it big deliberately.
What is it about the Torchlight models that look good and fine with their proportions that mine does not? How can I change the shape of my guy so that people don't mistake him for being hyper realistic with a badly proportioned head.
My friends are telling me "People who have really bad proportions and pass it off as 'stylized' suck etc" and I'm not trying to hide behind this whenever they call me out on it.
The one point they raised is that the Torchlight models have exaggerated pieces. The Alchemist's hands are huge. The Warrior's upper body is massive with tiny legs, the Rogue is actually pretty reasonably proportioned.
Anyways, I'm trying to move AWAY from realism, what can I do to improve my model away from realism? Sadly they showed me how to fix it to be even more realistic by lengthening the torso and legs and shrinking the head, which is fine if I wanted it to be realistic, which I don't.
Their hands are all pretty beefy, maybe I'll give him huge hands? Come to think of it the WoW hands are also pretty massive. When I get home I'm going to overlay my guy over the Torchlight Alchemist and see what proportions are different.
EDIT: HOME NOW!
The result are in and the outlook is tiny headed.
My old one on the left, overlaied with Torchlight concept art in the middle, and the concept art in question on the right.
Main differences between the two shapes is that Torchlight's feet and hands (borrowed the WoW male's hands for this shot since mine are indispose) are huge, the torso had to be brought in slightly and the crotch was raised almost a full head higher.
I symmetried it and I never fixed the UVs so the texture is wonky in place right now, disregard that.
Overall I like the look and flow of everything much more then before. It still needs to be tweaked a bit though. Thoughts? Opinions?
I really wanted him to have a big head but evidence against it keeps mounting against that and I'm just not experienced enough to make a large head work.
His torso feels a little bit wide right now though, sorta gorrila like.
If you want to match the torchlight proportions you should bring your waist line up a bit and widen the legs from the knee on down. As well you might consider making the feet much bigger and giving him some over the top sized gloves
All good crits, while I don't want it to specifically -be- torchlight per say, I just want to get away from the realism department. Torchlight was just the most recent thing I played with a good style etc to follow as an example.
While I like the body shape, I'm not really digging the giant hands and feet. It feels like too much of a breach from realism into stylized.
New body here:
Moved further away from the Torchlight concept. Now it's more like 'inspired by' rather then 'trying to be exactly'
Hey everyone, had a bit of a tumble today and broke my foot so I'll probably be going dark updates-wise for a bit. EDIT: Scratch that, I'm actually feeling pretty good as long as I don't move around much and I'll probably just keep working on it. Also don't know how to add strikeouts to my text.
I made some small adjustments to the body last night though so I'll post what he's at so far:
Been messing around with it a bit more , no texture changes yet though. I feel like his profile is a bit lacking, while he looks good from the front, the side just isn't holding itself up.
What can I do to improve his profile? Specifically the arms look weak from the side even if from the front they're pretty good. Another problem I'm getting is that from the front the neck looks too short but if I fix it from the side it looks too tall.
well.. there are lines that you can follow.. your neck line can start where your ears are aligned.. that will buff him out a little... but not over exaggerated... then... your shoulders could be a little broader.. your arm goes from big to small as you go down from your shoulder. I guess it looks weak cuz he has a straight line for a shoulder arm... but its really improving... I like the face.. it turned out way better.
Broadened up the shoulders slightly and tried to taper his arm a bit, also brought shoulders and arms back a little bit and messed with the face a little bit.
Repaired the UVs, going to finally fix the hand and then move back into painting.
Hey man, I've been watching this tread for a while now, I quite like how he looks now, I won't critique as far as proportions go, I'll leave that to everyone else! I do like the general look to the character though, I really like his head, trousers and boots, not too keen on the torso and arms though, looks a little washed out and undefined compared to the parts that I like.
Overall, to me, looking good!
Also, I struggle with trying to create something non-realistic and making it look the way I want when still being tied down to standardised proportions etc How do you make things look the way you want if the restrictions are so limited?! lol
Hey man, I've been watching this tread for a while now, I quite like how he looks now, I won't critique as far as proportions go, I'll leave that to everyone else! I do like the general look to the character though, I really like his head, trousers and boots, not too keen on the torso and arms though, looks a little washed out and undefined compared to the parts that I like.
Overall, to me, looking good!
Also, I struggle with trying to create something non-realistic and making it look the way I want when still being tied down to standardised proportions etc How do you make things look the way you want if the restrictions are so limited?! lol
Haha yeah I should think they are underdefined, I haven't gotten to painting most of the torso yet. Pants and face and boots are the only parts who have felt any real love and care, I was mostly worried about getting those proportions right before moved back onto texturing since changing the proportions messed up the UVs on me.
Haha yeah I know what you mean through, this is still more realistic then I intended but it looks nice so I'm okay with that. All I can say is I've gone through many iterations and a lot of reference art to get him to look the way he does now. If you're trying to capture a certain style or feeling, all I can say is look at existing examples of it, like in my case stuff like Fable and Torchlight.
Hey everyone. Spent some time detailing the torso folds, I think it looks infinitely better then before now.
Currently the gloves still need work, and so does his nice big collar portion. I still need to decide on what will go on his belt, and maybe an emblem on his shirt.
Oh and UV seaming needs repairing in places, like the pants and collar.
WHOOPS I also forgot I wanted the coat to have pockets, I'll work those in in the next update.
Color isn't done yet, I only put that there to test methods of painting over the black/white. I'll take it out of my next post so more people don't misconstrue the color as being done.
Desaturated him again here, and toyed around with various symbols for his shirt. The more obviously already a symbol ones were mostly for fun while I tried to come up with something original.
Alternatively, if anyone can think of a nice symbol or logo or whatever he should have, shoot!
Actually, after further consideration, I might leave the shirt blank, and when I bring it into whatever engine I'll have the option to cycle through various chest logos, kinda like your tabbard symbol in WoW or Cape in GW, sprays etc.
I'll cut out most of the plagiarizer ones or change them 30% to be parodies (Like Batman > Night Marsupial) and probably add some more to it.
lol do you know what the lemon party is? Don't know if you want that on a T-shirt
I like the Republican/Democrat Lemon Party spoof version morso then the literal party hats and balloon Lemon Party.
And the stealth goatse. My theme is memes and references semi disguised lol. One last batch of shirts incoming soon and after that I'm going to go back to working on folds.
Part 3:
Pretty cheesey stuff. Okay back to real work!
There, done some minor changes to things. I really feel like I am slowing down a bit since its mostly small details and polished left before moving onto color. If anyone can see anything largely jarring or wrong, or even just personal perference to improve it anywhere, please shoot.
Also because I haven't shown it in a while, the current state of the texture map:
not sure how you are blending right now but this is the method i use. the reason i say something is you can see all of the brush strokes on the texture, mostly on the face and hair.
i use the smudge brush with some scatter and a soft edge. it samples around your stroke giving you a more even blend.
Are you planning on keeping the hair like it is right now? All the white in the back + the horizontal lines in the back look rather odd
No, I originally drew that in like two minutes to remind myself hair goes here and just never got around to cleaning it up. I'll get on that as soon as I get home today.
and @Screwonhed I'll try some of that too once I get home. The hair yeah it's pretty obvious since I forgot to finish that part but I'm not 100% seeing the unblended strokes on the rest of it, maybe it's just because I've been working at it for so long I'm blind to my own art's mistakes, kinda like how I tuned out the hair needed being done.
I haven't got photoshop here to show it but usually the only brush I use is a normal circle with 100% hardness, Opacity and Flow set to Pen Pressure, and lastly I usually have wet edge on as well. Haven't even touched the blur or smudge tools, I can never get anything but really shitty and amateur looking results out of them that look inconsistent with the rest of the texture.
No use saying it now, but like alot of people, you'll see why going from b/w to colour is such a big waste of time
One thing i'd like to point out, is that add wrinkles where they are needed and dont add them just for the heck of it. Cant really point any out atm. More of advice than crit really.
No use saying it now, but like alot of people, you'll see why going from b/w to colour is such a big waste of time
One thing i'd like to point out, is that add wrinkles where they are needed and dont add them just for the heck of it. Cant really point any out atm. More of advice than crit really.
I've only been trying to add wrinkles where stuff would make it wrinkle but I'll look out for that. Cant wait to get home, do the hair, gloves, then color time.
Ugh. While the end result looks shown in the tutorial really good, I find the tutorial itself incredibly difficult to follow, and my own attempts aren't coming out very good. Ill try to find a better tutorial.
Ran out of time today though so I'll probably have an update tomorrow.
This is the first version of the hair. It's mainly a base composite stitched together Frankenstein from various real people hair samples. I'll be building up upon this and fixing the UVs as I go.
Hand painting realistic hair from scratch wasn't playing out very well so I think this will help me a lot.
and in an unrelated note, some tools I built for him that are in no particular scale to each other.
What eyebrows lol? But seriously he doesn't have any (yet) like Whoopi Goldberg, the dark line is just the shadow from the eye sunk into the skull, I could probably lighten it up a bit to make it seems like eyebrowy until I give him eyebrows.
Hey everyone. Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada, and I don't have my tablet on me so no texture work, modeled a few more tools/melee weapons though, name a pipe wrench, a shovel, and a handgun (M1911)
Hey everyone, me again. I'm still having a tremendously hard time with the hair. Every time I try to paint it from scratch it comes out terrible because I have no idea what I am doing, and all the tutorials I can find essentially boil down to "Step one draw some lines, step two finish it up for photo realistic hair."
I'm feeling really dissatisfied with the head in general. It just looks wrong, feels wrong to me but I can't put my finger on why. I'll play with it some more.
In the mean time, if anyone has any knowledge of how to paint hair and would like to show me, that would be great, I'm struggling here beyond belief and I'm going to drown at this rate, I feel like I'm going to spend weeks of work alone plugging away on something that will come out terrible (Like the very first face) when someone with twice my ability could do in five minutes.
The contrast in your hair is pretty extreme (and the skin too, actually). Consider the global direction of the light and try to get the top of the head to be a little lighter than the bottom. You want to think of the bigger shape first (roughly spherical) and make sure that reads clearly without things like highlights and the brightness of the scalp line overpowering it.
Forget about tutorials and just find some nice photos and try to paint what you see. Tutorials are good for showing tricks and stuff, but I think general observation would be more helpful in this case.
When painting the hair, start with the bigger shapes and locks of hair with low contrast. Gradually build up with more detail and contrast as you need it. Be impressionistic about it at first before going into fine strands, and even then you only need a few here and there to fool the eye. Keep in mind the overall lighting of the head as mentioned above, and don't let it be ruined by really dark shadows or really bright highlights. Again, good reference should help a lot in deciding just how light or dark you should be going.
Decent tutorial, though his end result just doesn't feel like it's pushing it far enough to me, like it could look nicer.
Maybe it's just personal preference and 'bad' but I like the look of a strong contrast, without it it just feels like someone threw in a skylight and washed out the artwork completely. I will make it lighter at the top and darker as it goes down though, but from looking at references the hair looks pretty much how I tried to paint it, it tends to be darker at the roots and have sort of a ring of highlight around the head.
I know you're going to take this the wrong way but I'm going to say it anyway...
The hair looks like a mix between meat and rusty metal. Even if you don't go to the trouble of creating hair planes and arranging them you should follow the painting portion of that tutorial.
EDIT: Coincidentally I posted the same tutorial you said you would follow. I think the main difference is in how your approaching color. Furiae paints with color, you colorize black and white. I'm not sure which layer blending method you're using but all of them fall short and require a lot of painting after the fact to get it to blend correctly. Just about everyone who starts off painting black and white and colorizes, switches to painting in colors because they spend so much time cleaning it up, that they teach themselves to paint with colors.
I will make it lighter at the top and darker as it goes down
So I can say what I want about fixing it and that's not good enough? :poly124:
@Vig Yeah I saw that tutorial. I really liked the end result but I found it really difficult to follow their process. The current hair minus the color wasn't painted following that, it's a composite of actual hair photos, because when I tried to follow that tutorial the end result was horrifically laughably bad, like not something I would ever want to show to anyone bad.
When I tried to do the hair, I had done it in color from scratch like the tutorial painting and everything, the only reason it ended up being black and white then colored was because once I moved off of that onto the hair samples, they weren't a consistent hair color so I b/w'd them to make it easier to make consistent.
I know the hair looks pretty bad right now, you don't have to immediately assume/accuse me that I'll take everything the wrong way because it's you saying it or something. Before was a misunderstanding, we're both over that.
EDIT: Sports had me out late tonight, and now I got to take care of some banking and academics, so I probably won't have another update tonight. I'm going to retry the hair tutorial Vig and I both linked again, and everyone can see where I am going wrong.
Spent the better part of today struggling along with the hair tutorial. I'm taking a break from it for now so here is my progress so far, completely uncleaned up.
Like the tutorial says I am working at a much higher resolution then will be on the final texture. I'm including the texture map as well here because on the model I am having some UVing issues where the hair is bent at awkward angles I need to fix.
For simplicity's sake I am using the same four colors she'd shown in her tutorial, I'll probably tweak this a little bit afterwards. Face map is its full size, you can clearly see where I spent a lot of time detailing and where I haven't gotten to yet.
okay, so i grabbed some sources of similarly specced characters, with hair.
images incoming
As you can probably tell, there are some common traits among all of these. All the hair is fairly low detail, fairly dark, and fairly desaturated (with exception to Kate Archer's hair). Also looking at the flats from the vice city character, there doesn't appear to be much uv space given to the hair. If you don't choose to use planes for hair, and are going with this low spec, the simpler, the less attention, the better in my opinion.
I think you went too extreme with the highlights and shadows, as a result it has a lot of hills and valleys. You want to paint it more like you would a sphere, but what you've got is a bit more like corrugated metal.
Also try to imagine an overall light source and keep in mind that light scatters a bit like sub surface scattering when interacting with hair, it won't cast harsh shadows most of the time. Even if the highlights are bleach highlights, working that overall light source and re-enforcing the hair mass will help.
For sure hair can be very hard to paint on the UV layout and get the grain going the right way and get the lighting working, so it might be easier to block in the masses with viewport canvas and once you get some general guides take it into photoshop and refine it.
The more sphere less corrugated metal reminded me of THIS art tutorial I use a lot. Useful stuff.
I like your version Vig, it's cleaner then mine but it feels sorta too realistic, not sharp enough for what I am going for. It's like the opposite end of the spectrum of mine, I need to try and find a nice middle ground between the two. The deeper dark spots on mine definitely need to sharpened up so they aren't like huge valleys.
Hair samples borrowed unscrupulously from various artists on CGHub. I'm shooting for something closer to this. Mostly high contrast with sharp gradients between shadow and highlight, rather then realy realistic soft shadowing.
I liked the hair in post #136 the best. I think the only thing off in that one is the fact that it wasn't flowing. It went vertical about halfway down and it didn't look good from then on. I must say though, I liked that variation the best.
I liked the hair in post #136 the best. I think the only thing off in that one is the fact that it wasn't flowing. It went vertical about halfway down and it didn't look good from then on. I must say though, I liked that variation the best.
136 was composites from photos and not actually painted, but the the lack of flow was probably just because my UVs are a little effed up near the back of the head right now.
I'll probably add some of the direction etc back into the current hair once I work on it after getting home later today.
and @Sectaurs because I like how it looks. It's his hair style.
That aside, pretending the face isn't totally messed up, how do these improvements look to the hair? Its all over the face and stuff right now, I'll clean that up after. I evened it out a bit like Vig's but kept some of my stronger highlights.
I really like the hair on the girl, on the left side, in the upper middle of your ref sheet, I think that's a great style to shoot for.
I think its better, but too sharply defined, almost as if you drew each hair instead of the blocks of color. You might be painting on a texture that's too big, it might be easier to paint at resolution? I think you're making progress and this is great practice.
Replies
Haha yes I know it's been dragging on. I sorta wish I could change the thread title since it's not really even about the face anymore.
The checklist is now:
Coat/Shirt/Sleeves
Final assessment and touch ups
Color!
Final Final Assessment and more touch ups.
Accessories (Not pictured) which includes:
-Bandoleer
-Backpack
-Wepon
Sleeping Roll
-????
-Profit
I'm also considering alternate heads.
Also after doing this I feel confident enough to do the next one in color from the get go. I learned a lot about light and shadow and I'm glad I did it in B/W.
BIG EDIT: My friends have been calling me out on his anatomy and proportions a lot. I -want- him to look hand painted, semi cartoony, far from realism like say HL2 male_02 or whatever model. In terms of mainstream games, like say... Torchlight. Torchlight is a really good example.
The Alchemist and Warrior are both five heads tall, the Rogue and that second concept peasant are six heads. My model is roughly five/half heads tall, and that head has been shrunk repeatedly because people saying it looked too huge, even though I was trying to make it big deliberately.
What is it about the Torchlight models that look good and fine with their proportions that mine does not? How can I change the shape of my guy so that people don't mistake him for being hyper realistic with a badly proportioned head.
My friends are telling me "People who have really bad proportions and pass it off as 'stylized' suck etc" and I'm not trying to hide behind this whenever they call me out on it.
The one point they raised is that the Torchlight models have exaggerated pieces. The Alchemist's hands are huge. The Warrior's upper body is massive with tiny legs, the Rogue is actually pretty reasonably proportioned.
Anyways, I'm trying to move AWAY from realism, what can I do to improve my model away from realism? Sadly they showed me how to fix it to be even more realistic by lengthening the torso and legs and shrinking the head, which is fine if I wanted it to be realistic, which I don't.
Their hands are all pretty beefy, maybe I'll give him huge hands? Come to think of it the WoW hands are also pretty massive. When I get home I'm going to overlay my guy over the Torchlight Alchemist and see what proportions are different.
EDIT: HOME NOW!
The result are in and the outlook is tiny headed.
My old one on the left, overlaied with Torchlight concept art in the middle, and the concept art in question on the right.
Main differences between the two shapes is that Torchlight's feet and hands (borrowed the WoW male's hands for this shot since mine are indispose) are huge, the torso had to be brought in slightly and the crotch was raised almost a full head higher.
I symmetried it and I never fixed the UVs so the texture is wonky in place right now, disregard that.
Overall I like the look and flow of everything much more then before. It still needs to be tweaked a bit though. Thoughts? Opinions?
I really wanted him to have a big head but evidence against it keeps mounting against that and I'm just not experienced enough to make a large head work.
His torso feels a little bit wide right now though, sorta gorrila like.
While I like the body shape, I'm not really digging the giant hands and feet. It feels like too much of a breach from realism into stylized.
New body here:
Moved further away from the Torchlight concept. Now it's more like 'inspired by' rather then 'trying to be exactly'
I made some small adjustments to the body last night though so I'll post what he's at so far:
Here is to recovering soon!
What can I do to improve his profile? Specifically the arms look weak from the side even if from the front they're pretty good. Another problem I'm getting is that from the front the neck looks too short but if I fix it from the side it looks too tall.
Broadened up the shoulders slightly and tried to taper his arm a bit, also brought shoulders and arms back a little bit and messed with the face a little bit.
Repaired the UVs, going to finally fix the hand and then move back into painting.
Reworked the hands. I like their shape now. though it could still use a little tweaking.
Overall, to me, looking good!
Also, I struggle with trying to create something non-realistic and making it look the way I want when still being tied down to standardised proportions etc How do you make things look the way you want if the restrictions are so limited?! lol
Haha yeah I should think they are underdefined, I haven't gotten to painting most of the torso yet. Pants and face and boots are the only parts who have felt any real love and care, I was mostly worried about getting those proportions right before moved back onto texturing since changing the proportions messed up the UVs on me.
Haha yeah I know what you mean through, this is still more realistic then I intended but it looks nice so I'm okay with that. All I can say is I've gone through many iterations and a lot of reference art to get him to look the way he does now. If you're trying to capture a certain style or feeling, all I can say is look at existing examples of it, like in my case stuff like Fable and Torchlight.
Haha thanks, me too. I defined some of the shapes in the sleeves and toyed with different ways of adding color to it. Came out best on the pants.
Once the torso gets detail to it I'm going to have to do some palette studies to get a good color scheme for his outfit.
Hey everyone. Spent some time detailing the torso folds, I think it looks infinitely better then before now.
Currently the gloves still need work, and so does his nice big collar portion. I still need to decide on what will go on his belt, and maybe an emblem on his shirt.
Oh and UV seaming needs repairing in places, like the pants and collar.
WHOOPS I also forgot I wanted the coat to have pockets, I'll work those in in the next update.
Color isn't done yet, I only put that there to test methods of painting over the black/white. I'll take it out of my next post so more people don't misconstrue the color as being done.
Desaturated him again here, and toyed around with various symbols for his shirt. The more obviously already a symbol ones were mostly for fun while I tried to come up with something original.
Alternatively, if anyone can think of a nice symbol or logo or whatever he should have, shoot!
Made a new batch of reasonably more unique logos.
I'll cut out most of the plagiarizer ones or change them 30% to be parodies (Like Batman > Night Marsupial) and probably add some more to it.
2 is definitely what you think it is, and I have more where that came from written down to doodle once I get home. :poly142:
I like the Republican/Democrat Lemon Party spoof version morso then the literal party hats and balloon Lemon Party.
And the stealth goatse. My theme is memes and references semi disguised lol. One last batch of shirts incoming soon and after that I'm going to go back to working on folds.
Part 3:
Pretty cheesey stuff. Okay back to real work!
There, done some minor changes to things. I really feel like I am slowing down a bit since its mostly small details and polished left before moving onto color. If anyone can see anything largely jarring or wrong, or even just personal perference to improve it anywhere, please shoot.
Also because I haven't shown it in a while, the current state of the texture map:
512x512
i use the smudge brush with some scatter and a soft edge. it samples around your stroke giving you a more even blend.
here's a picture:
hope that helps.
No, I originally drew that in like two minutes to remind myself hair goes here and just never got around to cleaning it up. I'll get on that as soon as I get home today.
and @Screwonhed I'll try some of that too once I get home. The hair yeah it's pretty obvious since I forgot to finish that part but I'm not 100% seeing the unblended strokes on the rest of it, maybe it's just because I've been working at it for so long I'm blind to my own art's mistakes, kinda like how I tuned out the hair needed being done.
I haven't got photoshop here to show it but usually the only brush I use is a normal circle with 100% hardness, Opacity and Flow set to Pen Pressure, and lastly I usually have wet edge on as well. Haven't even touched the blur or smudge tools, I can never get anything but really shitty and amateur looking results out of them that look inconsistent with the rest of the texture.
No use saying it now, but like alot of people, you'll see why going from b/w to colour is such a big waste of time
One thing i'd like to point out, is that add wrinkles where they are needed and dont add them just for the heck of it. Cant really point any out atm. More of advice than crit really.
I've only been trying to add wrinkles where stuff would make it wrinkle but I'll look out for that. Cant wait to get home, do the hair, gloves, then color time.
Hair time! I'll be taking tips from here and here
Ugh. While the end result looks shown in the tutorial really good, I find the tutorial itself incredibly difficult to follow, and my own attempts aren't coming out very good. Ill try to find a better tutorial.
Ran out of time today though so I'll probably have an update tomorrow.
This is the first version of the hair. It's mainly a base composite stitched together Frankenstein from various real people hair samples. I'll be building up upon this and fixing the UVs as I go.
Hand painting realistic hair from scratch wasn't playing out very well so I think this will help me a lot.
and in an unrelated note, some tools I built for him that are in no particular scale to each other.
What eyebrows lol? But seriously he doesn't have any (yet) like Whoopi Goldberg, the dark line is just the shadow from the eye sunk into the skull, I could probably lighten it up a bit to make it seems like eyebrowy until I give him eyebrows.
Hey everyone, me again. I'm still having a tremendously hard time with the hair. Every time I try to paint it from scratch it comes out terrible because I have no idea what I am doing, and all the tutorials I can find essentially boil down to "Step one draw some lines, step two finish it up for photo realistic hair."
I'm feeling really dissatisfied with the head in general. It just looks wrong, feels wrong to me but I can't put my finger on why. I'll play with it some more.
In the mean time, if anyone has any knowledge of how to paint hair and would like to show me, that would be great, I'm struggling here beyond belief and I'm going to drown at this rate, I feel like I'm going to spend weeks of work alone plugging away on something that will come out terrible (Like the very first face) when someone with twice my ability could do in five minutes.
Forget about tutorials and just find some nice photos and try to paint what you see. Tutorials are good for showing tricks and stuff, but I think general observation would be more helpful in this case.
When painting the hair, start with the bigger shapes and locks of hair with low contrast. Gradually build up with more detail and contrast as you need it. Be impressionistic about it at first before going into fine strands, and even then you only need a few here and there to fool the eye. Keep in mind the overall lighting of the head as mentioned above, and don't let it be ruined by really dark shadows or really bright highlights. Again, good reference should help a lot in deciding just how light or dark you should be going.
Maybe it's just personal preference and 'bad' but I like the look of a strong contrast, without it it just feels like someone threw in a skylight and washed out the artwork completely. I will make it lighter at the top and darker as it goes down though, but from looking at references the hair looks pretty much how I tried to paint it, it tends to be darker at the roots and have sort of a ring of highlight around the head.
Once I get home I'll show you my references.
The hair looks like a mix between meat and rusty metal. Even if you don't go to the trouble of creating hair planes and arranging them you should follow the painting portion of that tutorial.
Also check these out:
http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=3174
http://www.furiae.com/popup.php?text=hairtutorial
EDIT: Coincidentally I posted the same tutorial you said you would follow. I think the main difference is in how your approaching color. Furiae paints with color, you colorize black and white. I'm not sure which layer blending method you're using but all of them fall short and require a lot of painting after the fact to get it to blend correctly. Just about everyone who starts off painting black and white and colorizes, switches to painting in colors because they spend so much time cleaning it up, that they teach themselves to paint with colors.
So I can say what I want about fixing it and that's not good enough? :poly124:
@Vig Yeah I saw that tutorial. I really liked the end result but I found it really difficult to follow their process. The current hair minus the color wasn't painted following that, it's a composite of actual hair photos, because when I tried to follow that tutorial the end result was horrifically laughably bad, like not something I would ever want to show to anyone bad.
When I tried to do the hair, I had done it in color from scratch like the tutorial painting and everything, the only reason it ended up being black and white then colored was because once I moved off of that onto the hair samples, they weren't a consistent hair color so I b/w'd them to make it easier to make consistent.
I know the hair looks pretty bad right now, you don't have to immediately assume/accuse me that I'll take everything the wrong way because it's you saying it or something. Before was a misunderstanding, we're both over that.
EDIT: Sports had me out late tonight, and now I got to take care of some banking and academics, so I probably won't have another update tonight. I'm going to retry the hair tutorial Vig and I both linked again, and everyone can see where I am going wrong.
Spent the better part of today struggling along with the hair tutorial. I'm taking a break from it for now so here is my progress so far, completely uncleaned up.
Like the tutorial says I am working at a much higher resolution then will be on the final texture. I'm including the texture map as well here because on the model I am having some UVing issues where the hair is bent at awkward angles I need to fix.
For simplicity's sake I am using the same four colors she'd shown in her tutorial, I'll probably tweak this a little bit afterwards. Face map is its full size, you can clearly see where I spent a lot of time detailing and where I haven't gotten to yet.
images incoming
As you can probably tell, there are some common traits among all of these. All the hair is fairly low detail, fairly dark, and fairly desaturated (with exception to Kate Archer's hair). Also looking at the flats from the vice city character, there doesn't appear to be much uv space given to the hair. If you don't choose to use planes for hair, and are going with this low spec, the simpler, the less attention, the better in my opinion.
I think you went too extreme with the highlights and shadows, as a result it has a lot of hills and valleys. You want to paint it more like you would a sphere, but what you've got is a bit more like corrugated metal.
Also try to imagine an overall light source and keep in mind that light scatters a bit like sub surface scattering when interacting with hair, it won't cast harsh shadows most of the time. Even if the highlights are bleach highlights, working that overall light source and re-enforcing the hair mass will help.
For sure hair can be very hard to paint on the UV layout and get the grain going the right way and get the lighting working, so it might be easier to block in the masses with viewport canvas and once you get some general guides take it into photoshop and refine it.
I like your version Vig, it's cleaner then mine but it feels sorta too realistic, not sharp enough for what I am going for. It's like the opposite end of the spectrum of mine, I need to try and find a nice middle ground between the two. The deeper dark spots on mine definitely need to sharpened up so they aren't like huge valleys.
Hair samples borrowed unscrupulously from various artists on CGHub. I'm shooting for something closer to this. Mostly high contrast with sharp gradients between shadow and highlight, rather then realy realistic soft shadowing.
136 was composites from photos and not actually painted, but the the lack of flow was probably just because my UVs are a little effed up near the back of the head right now.
I'll probably add some of the direction etc back into the current hair once I work on it after getting home later today.
and @Sectaurs because I like how it looks. It's his hair style.
This. It makes no sense at all how youre doing it now.
That aside, pretending the face isn't totally messed up, how do these improvements look to the hair? Its all over the face and stuff right now, I'll clean that up after. I evened it out a bit like Vig's but kept some of my stronger highlights.
I really like the hair on the girl, on the left side, in the upper middle of your ref sheet, I think that's a great style to shoot for.
I think its better, but too sharply defined, almost as if you drew each hair instead of the blocks of color. You might be painting on a texture that's too big, it might be easier to paint at resolution? I think you're making progress and this is great practice.