Stylised Pirate (Cephlapod Dreams)

FAT_CAP

So I thought I would make a thread for my pirate character I have been working on over the past few months - as much for myself, to keep all the images together, as for anything else!

The idea for this guy was to try something more stylised than I have been working with recently, adding a sprinkling of humour and visual story to the character, and adding some saturation and nice materials into the mix.

This guy uses a mix of materials including Xoliul's, 3 Point Shader, a hair shader, and some hacking together of the whole thing. Polycount comes in around 20,000, which, while high, isn't totally out of realistic bounds for certain scenarios, and could obviously be optimised for a specific situation.

So - on with the images...

Posed and a bit of post work with that Photoshoppy goodness.


Body Turnaround


Head Turnaround


ZBrush Body


ZBrush Head


I haven't got the energy to go back and make changes to this guy now, but comments still totally welcome. Hope you guys like it!

makecg

seen it on cghub !
great work

brandoom

Great work FAT. Such an awesome piece.

Yar!

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=os5TXyJlEMc[/ame]

skylebones

I love this, it's great work!

Frankie

Looks great Sam, nice one!

crazyfool

Looks awesome Sam, love the materials and texture work.

Only crit is I wish the necklace was modelled or alpha'd and maybe his expression was played with more. Slight squint of the eye and raised nostril/laugh lines to push the snarl more. But its f***ing awesome Sam great job!!!!

redbranch

Very nice work Sam. The face looks like me on a Monday morning. Nice Octo-goop!

Red

aajohnny

Front page worthy....amazing man

daphz

super nice work man, this should be put up as a banner!

Jbird

It's great!

FAT_CAP

Thanks for the comments guys. It means a lot and is really rewarding that the work and time I put into this guy makes people smile

@Frankie - Cheers man - nice to hear from you Hope things are going well on your end. You still at the last place we were at?

@Brandoom - Haha, one of my friends is a massive Alestorm fan so maybe there was some subliminal inpiration, leaking into my brainbox from those guys!

@crazyfool - Cheers Yeah the necklace having supporting geometry is the most commented upon aspect, and in retropsect might have been a good choice. By the time I realised it would be a good idea to model them in, I had moved onto the body and didnt have the enthusiasm to carry me through and go back and remodel, bake, texture it again unfortunately... I'll definitely keep it in mind for the next character though.

Somebody on another forum asked for wires so I knocked up some quick and dirty images and thought I'd post them here. There are definitely places for optimisation, with polys easily being cut down for certain situations, and areas such as the hair are deliberately dense as the anisotropic shader really picks up the lowpoly smoothing - but I thought I would post them anyway.

I had to double up on geometry for certain effects to work in the Max viewport, such as the double spec and fresnel on the octopus, transparency and fresnel on the drips, and seperate spec and gloss values on the iris\ lens on the eye - all of which could have been done in shader inside UDK or similar, but which I just used double geometry and two shader setting in Max to achieve.


Body Wires


Head Wires

felipefrango

Thanks for the wires man, really appreciate it! I have to ask though, when you said that you "had to double up on geometry for certain effects to work in the Max viewport", why limit yourself to that? I'd love to see your models on a true game engine environment like UDK or Marmoset. You could set up some awesome shader stuff in UDK that would look heaps better than anything you could hack to work in Max.

Lonewolf

really nice work man

FAT_CAP

@Felipefrango - Using geometry tricks to get certain effects in Max was only really because I hadn't tried to replicate those materials (transparency with gloss and fresnel etc.) before with the realtime shaders in Max, and had just assumed they would work straight out of the box. When they didn't it seemed like a quick fix to just double the gemoetry on certain areas and use a combination of materials to get a certain effect, rather than export it to another game engine, re-import all my textures again, balance them for that engine, setup a whole shader tree in UDK or whatever, test it, setup lights, cameras, ground planes etc - all to get a similar result.

I also like just screengrabbing out of 3DS Max because I can set some nice AA and ambient occlusion along with some nice realtime shadow effects, then also grab alpha and Z-Depth easily to help the final comp. Having everything previewing quickly and easily in the viewport, in one package, is much better, for me, than setting up the thing in an engine

@Lonewolf - Thanks man

felipefrango

Yeah man, I see what you mean. Actually I use Xoliul's shader and Max viewport grabs myself, but Marmoset specifically seems so simple and easy to use, there should be little to no texture tweaking necessary to get awesome results, and there are a lot of build in post FX.

In the end I think it boils down to personal preference regarding presentation, personally I like when modelshave that "real time look", with as few post FX as possible, I can even do without AA most of the time.

The models themselves are amazing by the way, I like your style a lot, this and the biker are just plain awesome.