Cyborg Aerial Sniper

GabeLamas

My latest concept character is the Cyborg Aerial Sniper. This is my character concept that I used for animating a low-poly character.

I first took the character thumbnail and did a quick, cartoony sketch of the character in Photoshop

Concept Sketch


And here is the finished sketch...



I first started with exporting a human mesh that was retopologized in ZBrush, and edited in 3Ds Max. The Jets and the rifle were also modeled in 3Ds Max.

Model with Wireframe


For the Character's body I did the high-Frequency/ Tertiary detail in ZBrush amd baked out all of the respcetive maps. All the maps ended up in Photoshop for Editing, and
are all 1024x1024 .png files.

Texture Maps!


I do plan on Animating this character. In fact I already have--I just need to get a website up and running to post the video files.
So far I have a 194 frame animation running.
This one of my serious takes on Image compositing. I feel that it's so rewarding considering that I'm making a coposition based on a character that I took from concept to animation.

Compositing



Anyway, please comment and critique on my new character! Thank you!

Ace-Angel

*Cracks fingers* Ok, lets get started then?

Model: Looks pretty solid, but I feel a tad too many polies are on the face, you collapse a few edges/points here and there and it should be much lighter. Same deal with the knees, you could collapse all the points behind the knee and you would get a much better deformable joint. Calf is in the same territory.

Texture: They look pretty bland, not detailed enough, they lack any form of volume or depth in many cases. The Diffuse is the number one culprit, it's simply too flat, the small scrubs don't show at all, I suggesting crushing the levels abit more to get a much decent 'pop' in them, and try avoiding pure solid colors, if you're painting blue, trying going in 90% ranges for blue, too much solid color kills the look.

Multiply your Cavity ontop of your Diffuse and put the Opacity down to 50% or lower, as to not overdose on shadows, but have enough of recess information faked in it if your engine is good at shadows and such from the normal map.

Specular is also another culprit alongside the (or lack of) Roughness/Gloss map. It isn't compensating or giving depth to your Normals as it should, there is no definition for any recess information, they're flat high-lights, which is a big no-no for Spec's, since they're fighting the Normal information in the first place.

If I were you, I would exchange the Specular textures as my Roughness map and the Cavity as my Specular just to see as test on what need changing and how much better it will look and start tweaking from there.

I'm not sure what you're using your Cavity and Occlusion textures for? They're not natural attributes that you can plugin in willy-nilly in a material, so if you could expand on that, it would be great.

Lastly, take care what you do with the details in which area, so far it seems like your jetpack has a snake skin thing going on, which is pretty silly by many standards, but at the same time, you clearly can't see the snake skin details.

1024 for both pack, rifle and character is also pretty silly. If you're going low-rez, put both the rifle and pack in one texture, since they won't have the same importance as a character, especially for items so small and lacking any real information.

Also, you could have only UV'ed half of your model and mirrored the rest and gotten the same result, I don't see anything unique enough to warrant a full UV, you could have saved textures space. Make the most out of your current UV, add some symbols or badges on one side, etc to make reason for using such space. Add a massive dent on one side of his helmet, make it count.

Composition: I'm not sure where the flames are supposed to be coming from, so there is that. The background is TOO nosy, try with a simpler style of gradient background. Tone down the distance of the flames, and choose a better stock image to manip (something which is straight and simple and doesn't look like an explosion).

Also, pose you character in a more dynamic way (superman or rocketeer comes to mind), the current one looks pretty tame, and doesn't reflect the jetpack-superhero motif very well.

Cheers and good luck with any changes you might make.

nick2730

angel hit on alot of good points. Biggest thing standing out is how bland it is.

Another thing is the background i dont even want to look at the character cause there is so much going on it hurts my eyes and hard to focus on a single location

GabeLamas

Thanks, guys! All these replies really cleared things up for me. I think I now know what to do when I tackle the unwrapping and texturing process. This is also one of my first characters in which I tried to do Image compositing, so having this advice really cleared things up for me. I guess I should really strive to recreate the pose drawn in the concept art stage and have a better choice of abstract backgrounds.