Do the Nanosuit!
greentooth
Hi PCs!
This is gonna be my nanosuit.
Mutand League is over so i decidet to do something new. Well actualy i do this at work right now, its for a prototype we are working on. i have been allowed to post this here.
also i have no idea of character design, i just flow with the anatomy...
he will be realy massive, UT3-like. Styleguide is Scifi-fantasy, sort of UT3 meets The witcher, not that final-fantasy-asia-stuff.
I never realy did any hardsurface modeling, so this is gonna be hard.
Anyway CC is welcome, this has got to be beast!
current state: more armor
This is gonna be my nanosuit.
Mutand League is over so i decidet to do something new. Well actualy i do this at work right now, its for a prototype we are working on. i have been allowed to post this here.
also i have no idea of character design, i just flow with the anatomy...
he will be realy massive, UT3-like. Styleguide is Scifi-fantasy, sort of UT3 meets The witcher, not that final-fantasy-asia-stuff.
I never realy did any hardsurface modeling, so this is gonna be hard.
Anyway CC is welcome, this has got to be beast!
current state: more armor
Replies
the nanosuit itself is the lowest layer, ontop of wich i´ll pack the real armor.
ts going to be one boss battle, simply one character vs one evil bossmonster + 1 environment. My studio is a german indi-developer wich you probably have never heard of, we usually do advertising and augmented reality-games.
But this prototype shall prove to future investors that we are capable of more than that.
The problem with the suit is that the concept is not realy finished, and the suit is the only thing that is definitly nailed down, so i start with that. Lucky me i currently have no real timelimit, and i am realy no concept artist, so im gonna iterate while modeling.
If you are not much of a 2d concept artist maybe you could start using zbrush for 3d concepting, dynamesh is awesome for that.
i went on to build the muscle of the suit, since i got nothing else to do and i dont think they will change drasticly in the concept. the main features defining the suit, will be the hard, immovable parts i guess. And if not, atleast i did some hardsurface practise X)
The company is called empea. As i wrote before, right now all games we published are advertising games, and i am the only Modeling/Texture artist here.
Also the problem with the concepting is not that i would not pocess the skills to visualize them, but rather that i never realy got into character design, especially scifi is realy hard to figure out for me.
also lil update here:
so after all i did that myself too.
i dont know if this is readable to anyone, but it works good for me and im the only one who has to model by that :P
also started blocking out the armor.
i must admit that i am realy have problems with this hard surface stuff.
but today i realy learned a lot while solving a multitude of problems.
also the boolean oparations dont seem to work with more complex meshes.
i gues ill have to use zbrush, they seem to work there no matter how complex the mesh.
i figured out paintovers are a realy good way, if your stuck with the model and dont know how to progress.
also thx ablaine, for the hint, legs are 10% longer now.
character should be done then so i can move on to the weapon, wich hopefully will be done till the end of the week too.
i reduced the size of his hands, but apart from that there is realy not much i can do to fix this.
anyway HP is done for now, maby ill add some smaller details here and there.
plans have changed, next up is retopo and crazy baking action.
anyway retopo is done, also baking oh his chest, arms, head and pants. only upper body armor left.
this was realy anoying, lots of correction by hand had to be done.
xnormal bake failed catastrophal so i had to do it in max, wich realy took its time.
if eveything goes as planed he should be done by then end of the next week.
oh and yeah he has less then 4K polys :P
1. THE PROBLEM AREA
what you have here looks realy shitty if you look at it from the side,
in the illustrations you can see what the normal usually looks like after the bake, what it should look like if the highpoly would be projected correctly (but it cant, cause it has to conform to the edgy shape of the lowpoly)
and in the 3rd illustration how it will look like in the end.
2. THE NORMAL AFTER BAKING
at the edge you can see this ,red marked, ugly U-shapes. you have to get rid of theese!
3. THE UV
4. MANUALY OVERPAINTED NORMALMAP
this is what it should look like in the end. i always leave a slight ca. 1 pixel border, this bumps up the edge a bit.
5. THE RESULT
no matter how good you bake this, you will almost always have this U-thingies at one side of each round edge.
also note the post below, much better way to prevent this from actualy happening :P
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kinda stupid i see this now that i already did the bake and the hand-tweaking X)
this was very usefull, i´ll definetly keep this in mind for futur hard surface stuff.
as i said this is my first pure hard surface model, so im still learning^^
for the unwrapping i think this wouldnt have made such a huge difference in this case.
i know many guys try to keep theyr uv´s as straight as possible, but i tend to leave them like they relaxed cause flattening them out sort of dissables handpainting the texture in photoshop, wich i often do.
i usualy do the whole texture in photoshop, and only bring it to mudbox if i need projecting, or seamless stuff done.
baking done texture heavily WIP. im realy not sure with the colors, but after lots of experimenting i settled with this.
i just feel more confi working on something colorfull. its sort of motivating cause it imideatly looks kinda "cool" although not like i want it to look like in the end, be but cool^^
way more satisfying then hacking white splats onto a grey surface imo.
in the end all it takes to get it to a "real" level is desaturate and change the blendmode of the scratch layers.
and he will ofc get some sort of writings on his stuff, color falling apart and metal rusting around the scratches.
and yeah i agree on the arms, i had them way darker, but it lacked contrast. so i drew in additional highlights, but then forgot to make them darker again X)
and thats exactly what i did.
let me know what u think, and wich color fits him better (orwould fit him better, if you got any suggestions colorwise)
btw he hes ca. 3400 tris/verts 1024² gamerez textures applied here.
I think that style trumps "realism", especially for a character like this. He's obviously not a realistic character. Not to mention that real life knights wore bright colors all the time.
I agree about the cloth, though. Needs more folds in the normal map - right now it looks like it could be made of wood.
I like the hazard-orange color variation best (bottom image).
@orangeknight
about the camo, it is story-(and gameplay-)wise defined that he does not need to hide himself :P but i´ll try it anyway, could be too much detail, but could also maby look too cool to not take it^^
@dirigible
yes, while texturing i kinda became blind to this and didnt see it. ill definitly sculpt and bake out some variations for his pants and see what fits best, they definitly are way too clean now.
that was originaly intendet, cause they should sort of look neutral so that any armor could fit on them, but now i baked this one in the hard way. so giving the pants some more love wont hurt.
@MephistonX
haha thx i totaly didnt see that, but i think you are right. thx for pointing that out, i hope i can fix this with a bit of transformation in the lowpoly.
update with all this comin in tomorrow,
also can you guys suggest any futuristic sword reference?
i found some, but way too few to be realy usefull.
also he has more ass now (not visible from this angle :P)
so this char is too, next up is the evil boss-crab hes gonna be fighting.
btw the blue stringy stuff on the blade is moving, spent most of the time building that shader in unity.
also 2 diffrent textures applied here.
left is xoliul, right is unity
dont worry about the boots, was an experiment, but i still got the original harsurface thing.
Edges in the highpoly seem really tight in places, might be worth going through and loosening up your support edges in places.
Trouser folds look rather unnatural, i had trouble with this on my most recent character too, it's pretty tricky but if you play around with it some more and study drapery you should be able to improve vastly on it.
i pulled some out here and there, but still not realy confident about em.
and yeah folds :P always a struggle, i wanted to give him something a bit more stable.
like yeans-cloth or something.
heres the colors: