Brawl unfinished - Hsien-Ko the librarian

gregs

Hsien-Ko from Darkstalkers re-imagined as a librarian.

As always, real life got in the way, and caused me to to forget that I had to retopo some of her to get within the polycount - I was over a thousand over and still hadn't added her sister as an MP3 player, so hopefully the lack of limits in P&P will let me finish her. I spent too long writing shaders too!

Face:



Body: -

Wool and satin:

Wool, linen, rather bad leather and brushed metal:

Linen, tights and more bad leather:

Satin and shiny brushed metal:


Also I get to fix the glasses and the hideous belt!

All screenshots rendered in realtime (approx 250+fps on a Radeon 5750) in the Unity engine.

Hsien-ko (Lei Lei) and Darkstalkers belong to Capcom Co, Ltd, and will be removed on request.

letronrael

did i miss something...i mean are we still in the 90's?

gregs

Hahaha - I based clothes on what the university librarians used to wear when I went to uni - and that was in the 90s!

Edit: this was also my first character model since the Quake 2 days, so that was 90s too

Stromberg90

Wooho, my time machine did work... now I'm of to listen to mc hammer :smokin:

gregs

I agree completely. The main reason I entered the competition (and came back to character modelling) was that for the last few years I've had a few serious medical problems that keep me at home with limited general dexterity and stamina. One of my rehab therapists thought that doing something artistic again could help maintain what dexterity I have, and so I came back to doing this (as I found I couldn't use my hands for days after doing traditional art).

In the meantime I have spent a lot of my time being a mathematician, so of course I focused on writing complex anisotropic and subsurface scattering shaders (although they could use a lot of work too), when I should have been brushing up on the modelling side. Hopefully I can rectify that, as I do enjoy doing this, when I am able.

gregs

Thanks! I think I need all the help I can get

gregs

I don't suppose anyone could tell me what the worst bits - or the most 90s style modelling are, so I can focus on those whilst I work through the tutorials? I know the belt is terrible, but I think I know how to improve that. If it is the whole thing, then that's fine too - I have to learn

Stromberg90

I think you need to focus on everything really, a lot has changed, I dont see any parts that are much better than others.

Just keep on doing tutorials

leilei

Hi

I'd suggest xcloud's korean-only SM_tuto_p1.pdf which helped me immensely by staring at pictures showing some fine edgeloopery, but...... the internet no longer has it

if you're diving into learning modeling again i personally wouldn't want to go into highpoly - do some 1000-4000 poly stuff first. I feel there's a gap between a world of q2mdlr.exe here

konstruct

what I found kinda interesting is you never posted any full body shots- and you really seem to like focusing on surface properties. Maybe you should go down the path of shader tinkering? Theres so many crazy advanced techniques these days, you might enjoy poking around in the UDK or something similar

gregs

Thank you all - As Stromberg90 says, I shall certainly keep doing tutorials, but I think leilei's right - I should move to 1k to 4k first before trying to go highpoly - sculpting was something I'd never tried before. (Oh, and I think I found that pdf here.)
Konstruct - I really enjoy writing shaders, and am really interested in how light affects materials, from a mathematical point of view, so I will be continuing to study that, especially as I can do that when I'm not able to do modelling (which is most of the time). Plus there is the old-school programmer's challenge of it, in trying to get an effect into as few instructions as possible so it'll run on older hardware almost as well as modern stuff.

Again, thank you all for your encouragement!

Apostolon

Good work on the shaders. I've tried custom shaders in Unity before and it didn't go so well haha (but I'm not a programmer). I would definitely work on playing to your strengths and if you really want to do more character art start with the basics... studying the human figure and even figure drawing. If you work from the ground up, you will have an easier time getting forms right to begin with. Keep it up!

gregs

Thanks Apostolon - I think going back to the beginning is the best idea.
As for shaders, Unity now has the Strumpy Shader Editor, which I believe makes Unity's shaders more like UDK's, but I prefer coding them myself - just the way my brain works, I suppose.