[WIP/Critique] The Maxx
Hello everyone!
This is my first Polycount thread! Gotta say Im quite nervous as the level here is awesome! :poly136:
Anyways, I am working on an old character that I love: The Maxx! I have been a fan of Sam Keiths art for a long time and after watching The Maxx series again I decided to give old Brer Lappin a chance at 3d...
So here is where I started:
After gathering many images, I started sketching and made the Ortho views shown here.
I didnt want to emulate Sams Style but rather make my own take on the big purple guy. I wanted him to be wide like he is in the comics.
So I started modeling using Maya and here is where I am currently stuck:
As you all can see it is clocking at 3998 tris... I am sort of stuck on the face and parts of the anatomy... I dont really know how I can improve the geometry so I can make those muscles "pop" out more and give them definition... Any suggestions? Ideas? Or just general critiques?
You guys are more than welcome to bash it! As long as it helps me learn, of course! :poly002:
Thanks to everyone whos watching!
Cheers!
This is my first Polycount thread! Gotta say Im quite nervous as the level here is awesome! :poly136:
Anyways, I am working on an old character that I love: The Maxx! I have been a fan of Sam Keiths art for a long time and after watching The Maxx series again I decided to give old Brer Lappin a chance at 3d...
So here is where I started:
After gathering many images, I started sketching and made the Ortho views shown here.
I didnt want to emulate Sams Style but rather make my own take on the big purple guy. I wanted him to be wide like he is in the comics.
So I started modeling using Maya and here is where I am currently stuck:
As you all can see it is clocking at 3998 tris... I am sort of stuck on the face and parts of the anatomy... I dont really know how I can improve the geometry so I can make those muscles "pop" out more and give them definition... Any suggestions? Ideas? Or just general critiques?
You guys are more than welcome to bash it! As long as it helps me learn, of course! :poly002:
Thanks to everyone whos watching!
Cheers!
Replies
Here is a little update I did today.
I tried to shape the muscles a bit more and added some edge loops. I still kinda suck at this. Any critiques are more than welcome!
I will probably work a bit more on the topology tomorrow and then move on to the teeth, UV and start sculpting... I hope you guys have a great evening! See ya later!
:poly108:
Typically on a basemesh for sculpting you want the geometry to be evenly spaced uniform quads. That way when you subdivide the mesh the geometry will remain evenly spaced and a lot easier to work with. Like right now you have areas that are denser and made up of thinner longer quads - like on his chest and abs, and then considerably less geometry in his shoulders and upper arms.
The polycount wiki is your friend. check out some of the other basemeshes people use and look at the poly flow on those.
and this might just be personal preference, but I wouldn't uv your basemesh before bringing it into a sculpting app if you're planning on creating a realtime model of him later on. It can save you time and when you paint your lowpoly mesh you'll be painting at resolution instead of baking down from the highres sculpt.
keep going. I'm interested to see how you translate your concept's style into 3d space.
I guess I will take another day to clean up and evenly space the geometry.
I will keep on working on it as I want to see it done aswell, plus I figured coming here and posting the progress is a good way to learn and improve...
Update coming up soon!
say you were to uv and then paint on your sculpt in mudbox or whatever, you'd probably want to have a relatively high resolution texture so you could get some fancy details going on so let's just say you use a 2048 for the sculpt texture. You paint in a ton of detail - individual hairs, skin pores, lots of cool amazing stuff. Then you build your lowpoly mesh, uv that, and then the spec for the final ingame model only calls for a 512 texture. So you bake out the diffuse and everything to that 512 and you lose all the cool skin pore and hair details because of the resolution difference... now those details are just sort of a smudged mess, so you go back and have to touch up the diffuse texture by hand and repaint the tiny details at this resolution so that they actually show up.
where if you only uv and then texture the lowpoly you're only going through those steps once instead of essentially doing it twice. that's what I was trying to say with the painting at resolution. You would be painting at the final texture resolution that would go in game.
there are reasons and pipelines where you would want to texture your sculpt but for 'everyday' use and my personal preference is to just texture/uv the lowpoly.
hopefully that makes sense, i haven't had any coffee yet so...
Here is a little update. I have been busy with school work so unfortunately my Maxx model was left behind for a while.
I finally added the teeth and fixed a bit the mesh so its a bit more even all around. I still had some topology issues on the back and because of my eager ass I decided to export it into Zbrush and start doing some sculpting fun! :poly128:
I researched into a lot of bodybuilders images because I wanted him to have a huge built... I know he is huge and bulky so I wanted to make my own take on the anatomy but still being recognizable as The Maxx, or else he would be just another huge grunt... Thats why the head and the neck form a nice long curve with the back... Maxx´s silhouette is very characteristic...
So there you have it! :poly003:
Anyway, its comming along although more muscle exageration in the back wouldnt hurt. The main one I was looking at was more realistically aimed than the original concept that you are using:
Thanks man! Yeah, I still have to define more the muscles on the back and pretty much everywhere else. :P Its hard to find the time when theres so much else to do but when I do something new, I will post it back here so you guys can take a look at the progress.
I was taking a look at your stuff and I saw that you worked on the animated short Bi
But, does this I have to start mine now?
Anyway, dont sweat it. Do stuff in your own pace - there is nothing wrong with doing things slowly as long as it is on your won time. The only danger is that you lose interest in the project before you get to finish it. So, keep motivating yourself!
I used to loose interest in my personal projects before but I think school has helped me a lot to get things going, motivating myself and finishing projects. Plus I really want to make a good work on this guy so I can use it on my portfolio later. I was actually thinking if the Maxx might be a good portfolio piece or if he is too bland to put it in... But I don't know, I like the character...
*edit, also pay no mind to my wires. I had no clue about retopo tools back then.