[WIP] Zerg Centipede Leech

Turret

Wish I could come up with a better name for him but here are some shots of what I have been working on. I really liked a concept of a head that Darren Bartley made here http://cghub.com/images/view/110894/ and kinda just ran with it. I also took some inspiration from the zerg creatures made by blizzard. I have finished the shells, plates ad legs as all separate subtools and now I am fitting them together like puzzle pieces, once I have them in place I will make a larger body mass that they all sit on and connect too. I have been staring at this a lot and since I was just winging the whole design as I went along I wanted to post and get some feedback. How does the entire body mass feel and look? I can either go this centipede route or I was also thinking about taking out the back portion and just having a small body and huge head type creature. So please let me know what you think.

Wombatinahat

Bigger images would be more useful to see the details. Looks good so far tho. Always like to see some nice zerg creatures

Butthair

It looks good from far away, I see a lot of detail, I think. I'm happy that you've not presented in that nasty matcap red default, but hows about some perspective shots? I was never a fan of orthographic.

As for direction, I'd do both . They're both cool ideas and they might both look good. If you go with the centipede, please change up the size of the back, vary it a little. Centipedes are pretty straight and simple, but for entertainment, it might need to have a varying piece every nth section, or alternate pieces, or maybe just make each section a longer chunk. Just ideas, but I like all the things you made up while keeping it similar to the zerg look and style.

Lastly, as I think about the shorter version, I kind of chuckle imagining it scuttle around with that gaping mouth. It could probably eat me, but I would laugh my ass off if I saw it scurrying at me.

Turret

Sorry for the small pictures, my computer was starting to chug with all the subtools showing at once, hopefully these new screens will be larger. I went with the larger version first, since it will be easier to go back and make a funny smaller version later. For simplicity I didn't add in too much variations in size of the plates as suggested by hair but if I had the time I would in future projects and creatures. I am happy with the hi poly and now its time to retopo and build the low poly. Also all the subtools in the screens aren't at max subdivisions because again, my computer wouldn't be able to handle it haha.

Turret

So I am stumped and could use some help. I finished my low poly mesh which I made using nex tools. It is built up of quads and triangles, no crazy n gons, uved and ready for bake. I am going about my business as usual, not the first time I have used Xnormals to bake out maps however this time xnormals doesn't want to play nice. Using my normal basic settings, while trying to bake a normal map right after it loads all the high poly meshes it hits the "calculating faces tangent basis" and crashes, while trying to bake a AO it loads the high poly meshes then gives the shown error and stops generating the map. I cant find anything online about these errors so I was hoping someone here might have an idea what this is all about. thanks

jarrede

I think that error means you've got vertices that don't have UV's attached to them?

Erafic

Hmm... don't know if you might have the same problem I had a while ago, if so you might have a face somewhere that's making the whole mesh cause a fuzz. Have you run Maya's cleanup with the extra parameters turned on?

tonysladky

I've gotten the UV error plenty of times. You've almost certainly got a sneaky face somewhere that managed to either not get UV'ed or get its UV's deleted. Run a Mesh -> Cleanup on the Lo-Res and Select Matching Polygons (don't Cleanup Matching Polygons, as that will delete them and you could lose faces you need) and select Faces with Zero Map Area (default threshold should be fine). Once you've run it, they may be hiding somewhere awkward; I find it helps to isolate selected to get an idea for where they are, and then you can start re-UVing them and working them into your shells.

If it's still crashing, you might have a sneaky n-gon somewhere. I know I've had a few that somehow missed getting triangulated and caused me a lot of baking headaches. The same trick can be helpful with the Cleanup and Isolate selected.

Moving on from the technical stuff, my main crit is that from the side view, the top of the back of his head is a little boring. I'd like to see that get a little more love like some big blisters full of creep or armor plates or something to break the silhouette a bit.

Looking good. Best of luck with xNormal. Looking forward to seeing it with textures.

Turret

Thanks so much for the input everyone. I use mesh cleanup to find any N gons, but never used it for the zero map area. Once I did it found a few faces that apparently had zero map space.............but the funny thing was they did have uvs. So I just messed with the size and kept making them larger till the cleanup tool didn't select them, weird. Once that was taken care of Xnormal worked like a charm so thanks for the help. Here is the first bake test.

There is so much going on that it looks like I will have to bake out separate maps and then combine them to get the cleanest bake. Like areas where the legs meet the body. As for the back of the head that tony pointed out, I would like the head to be able to retract some into the body when the mouth is closed. If I put too much stuff there it would look like it wasn't meant to go in and out since it would rub against the shells.

tonysladky

Oh, that makes sense. I was going to guess that the head might be in "T-pose" and do something different when posed, but then I accidentally backed out of this page and lost the more verbose and specific version of what I was writing and didn't have the patience to re-write everything in as much detail as I'd had it the first time...

Turret

phew, finally. After much debate with a friend of mine he talked me into going back in and roughing up the model. I was going for a generic unit that could be used in game, but his perspective was that if I was making this for the purpose of putting in my portfolio/Demo reel then I should give him character, make him stand out. So I fleshed out a back story and really damaged him. On a desert covered world the Terren have set up a research facility where they experiment with Zerg genetics, often creating new breeds. Once these new mutations have outlived their usefulness to the scientists they are handed off to the marines which pit them against one another in gladiatorial combat for their amusement. This here is the Mauler, the current heavy wight champ and crowd favorite. He has seen many battles and come out of each victorious. The Terren assure that for safety reasons and fairness the baneling acid gene has been reprogrammed to be far less dangerous. This gold variant will cause sever burns but will not melt metal, allowing the Mauler to escape. They learned that lesson the hard way long ago.

As always critics welcome, once I take a little break from him I would like to get him rigged and animated. Also making a little stand for him would be nice. On a side note I finally figured out why my images are so small, photobucket was sizing them down as I uploaded them. Images shack doesn't. And now maybe I overdid it just a tad. =P

LRoy

Hey man. Really digging the style you've got with this. Not really sure the stitches and bandages make sense on a zerg though. I could see a lot of scars as they regenerate, but I don't know who would want to get close enough to treat that thing haha

KyleJensen

I think this would greatly benefit from a gloss map.

Sukotto

I'm really liking this model but the texture could use some work. This is a Zerg so you should really bump his spec up to make him all gross and slimy looking. You got it on his lips but I think you could make his stomach sack thing shinier too among other things. Maybe even throw a gloss map on him too. Keep it up!

Turret

Thanks for the feedback, I know zZerg are very slimy, but I wanted to go for a desert zerg, one that was unique, because he is an experiment. This guy doesn't need creep etc. as for a gloss map, in marmoset spec and gloss are the same so where would I plug an extra map into?

LRoy

You plug the gloss into the alpha of the spec map. I would still go for a bit of slimyness that's kind of their thing.

At least the mouth, eyes, glowing sac thing.