Eskimo Seal Shaman - WIP

robchristian

Hi.
I'm working on an Eskimo Seal Shaman 3D character at the moment.
It's very inspired by the Pandaren in WoW.
I'll be posting updates as I progress. I'd appreciate any feedback. Thanks.


Here's some concepts.

blackdragno

Really liking it

magmabolt

really cool designs, they made me think of pandaren mixed with the water tribes from avatar. I think the only part that's bothering me at all is the fact that the faces are a little flat, would love to see some variations in them.

definitely watching this one

Hang10

Holy crap those look awesome!

Dani McOrrie

cannot wait to see him modelled

Liamodearme

Wow! These are amazing, I can see this kid working for blizzard!

cholden

FYI, that's a racial slur (eskimo), they prefer Inuit.

robchristian

Thanks for the advice and kind words guys. There is definitely a water tribe influence in the character haha. I started watching through avatar a few days ago and am loving it. My concepts before looking at the water tribe costumes and studying the Pandaren closer were a lot weaker I think

I sat around thinking about how the head would look in 3D and after getting a general idea and looking at tons of adorable photo's of harp seal's, I started modelling. I felt that with my limited drawing ability I would only get a real sense of the proportions after modelling and deforming the head around until I liked it.

For the sake of it, here's what it looked like earlier today.


I didn't like the look of that one and the topology was awful so I went back in and started trying to fix the topology around the mouth and nose (redoing most of it) and played around with the proportions a bit, eventually coming to this.








I'm still fixing up the topology and working on it a bit, but there's an early look at it. I'm still deciding on how I'll do the whiskers, little dot eyebrow things and whatnot.

Feedback appreciated Also my bad if Eskimo is an unfavorable term. I always thought it was an acceptable collective term. Living in Australia, it's never come up. Sorry!

Steve Schulze

I like where you're going with this, but I reckon you could probably push the seal-like appearance further in the body. Given the streamlined nature of a seal, I wonder whether she might look a bit more suitably pinniped if you left out the breasts.

You could also take a bit more of a look at the hands and feet. The flippers on a seal are a very distinct feature. If you made the fingers and toes a bit longer and partly webbed them together, it might work well.

magmabolt

The front was definitely reading as seal but the profile looked a bit strange so I did a paintover based on some refs, and omg ur right, so many cute pictures!
what I noticed is they have the eyes and the mouth a little bit further back and the head is a little tall on your model which to me made it look more like a mole. Also they seem to have whiskers that go from front, all the way to the back to the mouth. Also not sure how realistic you are going with this piece but here you go

Visceral

I agree with whats been posted above, in the concept it looks moore like a Bear than a seal. However the modelling of the face makes it pretty clear.

robchristian

A couple of screenshots of the modelling coming along. I'll be getting into modelling the accessories and smaller features of the character soon. The hair is still something I'm playing with so the hair shown is likely temporary.

Lately I've mostly been focused on getting the fur trim on the jacket.I've tried a few methods including arranging a bunch of planes with alpha'd fur textures around but they don't come out particularly nice. At the moment I'm just using a tube with lots of sort of spikes to get the idea of fur tufts.

The hands were something that were frustrating me trying to figure out how they could hold things while still looking somewhat like a seal's flipper paw things. I'll have a go at webbing the fingers together and see how it turns out. Thanks for the advice. I also played with the head shape a bit more and redid the whiskers. If I were going for a more realistic seal head then I'd pull out the face more, but I think it's sort of sitting in the place I want it now.

So yeeh.. Still playing with hair and fur, modelling smaller parts and hopefully I'll move onto texturing soon.

robchristian

Some more fur testing with filler textures. Also a couple of minor changes. I think this is probably the best fur so far. Hopefully will start texturing soon.

robchristian

So I've started texturing. I realised after I started that I would have done the UV's very differently but an animator friend wanted to rig and animate her so I've locked off on changing the model.










Screen shots are from Marmoset.

I still have a bit of texturing to go, in particular I've been trying to learn to paint fur for the body.

Comments/advice always appreciated.

Envart

Awsm, this has definately got my 'seal' of approval!

robchristian

Oh dear god that is awesome. A walrus gave me a seal of approval. :O Life pretty much satisfied. Thanks XD

robchristian

So tomorrow will be the last day of my assignment working on this character. She still isn't as nice as I'd like, but I can always keep working on her after I've submitted her. As much as I would have loved to spend a lot of time on texturing, rigging her and animating her took priority. Tomorrow morning I'll hopefully get her into UDK and gamebryo, hopefully into the game level I made for my last assignment [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh6oJA53qIM&feature=plcp"]Gamebryo - Lonely Island level - YouTube[/ame] with Jen Limson http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=97972.


Here's some shots of her in wireframe.










And her current state in marmoset.






Big day ahead

Daven

I'm curious as to why you gave her boobs? It honestly doesn't seem to fit the character. I think you've done enough to distinguish the gender of the character without them and they seem really out of place given that it's a seal and everything (and seals don't have boobies). Other than that, I think you need to do a bit more work on the fur parts of her coat. Keep going with it but next time I think you should do more design exploration.

robchristian

It was definitely something I considered. I asked around for friends opinions and had a lot that preferred her with boobs. In the end it really came down to just preferring the character with boobs and it was sort of just a body type I wanted to try and model. I didn't really post a whole lot of info on the character up here, but in my mind she was a sort of motherly character. I also sort of wanted to stay on the side of a more human like character with seal traits than an animal that could stand.

As for the fur, I agree. I always intended to repaint the fur but I kept bumping it back to work on other things. I'll definitely work on that. Painting fur for both the coat and body has been a challenge for me. It was part of the reason I wanted to make this character.

Thanks for your advice, very appreciated.