praetus: haha thanks, i completely feel you on that, i need to figure out how to make it not spin from the nose and how to slow it down (did it through photoshop ), i was just too excited about my new gif making skillz last night XD Hang10: welcomes, and thank you so much! Geneeeeeeeeeeeee: haha thanks, yeah they're hugee (sorry! ), i'm going to fix the gifs when i get home and the rest of the guys are killing it, i'm totally inspired every time they throw around their wips in our chat seth: thank you! and no problem, i'm always interested in seeing how others do it, so i decided i should share too :P
loveeeeeeeee kato
I'm no character artist but at first glance the face looks wierd and elfish. It seems rather pointy like something you see more in elves. Maybe round it out and focus more on those reference girls you have.
Looks great! Liking the compositing work for the "comic" look.
One thing that's bugging me is the corners of her mouth. They go on too long. They thin out and carry on way past her nice puffy lips. kind of gives her the look of the Joker. but also just kind of looks like she's been cut into her cheeks.
My own personal preference but her ears feel a bit too big.
Daniel: thanks! yeah the hair will be different in the low, not 100% sure what i'm going to end with, i want to do some experimenting XD Orangeknight: hey thanks for the note, yeah her face gets pretty angler in some areas, i was trying to interpret her from the cover art though i honestly just wanted to turn her into kato (white/black/orange/brown haired girl in the refs :P), on my next girl i'm definitely going to hit for softer features! thank you so much for the input, i'll make sure to keep a close eye on it while doing the low and make some adjustments Curt: thank you so much! Skummel: Awe thanks so much! Fomori: her ears doooo look big still (i shrank them down a few times already :P) it might be the hair line playing a trick, but i'll make sure to pay extra attention to them and the lips in the low poly, thank you so much! ^____^
Tascha: haha thank you, yeah i have a horrible urge to go buy stripped pants, boots, and corsets :P Elfving: thank you! i'm trying to get better at sculpting hair so it's nice to hear i'm getting somewhere MGM: Thank you very much!
another quick sketckbook sculpt between workshop and work
for facial/hair practice:
okay so it's been a while since i've made a proper low poly (i usually work with controlled high polies, and decimated zbrush models unless the client provides a low, but then we have to rez it up for print purposes) and i spent a lot of time trying to figure out what i wanted built in and what i wanted floating, as well as where the loops were going to go for best animation. Haz helped me understand to simplify my shapes down, like the belt, it's all super layered in the high poly so i didn't know how i wanted to tackle that, but he did a nice paint over and now it's part of the pants with some extra floating pieces in the center
definitely enjoyed the process, learned a ton about good poly distribution so you don't get ugly shadow marks where there isn't enough polies to hold up the shape.
final low poly turnarounds:
wire shot with ao and normals:
~Unwrap/Casting/Texturing~
i love unwrapping, i bring my stuff into Headus UVLayout, cut everything apart and "smart" relax all the pieces, then bring it back into max and play tetris
on to casting! which is always a bit repetitive and a time consuming process, but is super crucial ^_^ i was trying out a few things here, figuring out what i can do so i have cleaner normals, i still ripped my high and low to shreds for good casts, but there wasn't very much fixing afterwards. for a few of the pieces i actually brought back into Zbrush and "projected all" so my low had become my high too (i tried to keep everything in quads as much as i could). this was mainly done for the face (and a few other pieces that made them cast a bit cleaner in xnormal), because i wasn't 100% happy with it and i wanted to re-sculpt it a bit (a lot), so i did in zbrush and then easily exported my high and low from the same mesh (that way i didn't have to retopo/adjust the head lots) and threw it into xNormal which was my casting tool of choice. i ripped my normals, ao, and my vertex colors (polypaint) and compiled everything in photoshop.
in max, i usually save out a wire shot (keep on screen mode) from the unwrap uvw and a black and white version (keep on multiply mode) as a better guide/map to my wires while i'm working. my polypaint helped a tonnnnnnn, then i just went in and painted more, kind of like i would for a 2d illustration. i had Haz take a look at my maps after i thought i was good with them, but i wasn't :P so i spent more hours leveling up some pieces to match the rest, harmonizing the values and trying to make sure stuff had things like material noise, scuff marks, wrinkles, highlights, good shadows and stuff like that everything is hand painted except the ponytail which i used some pieces from 3d.sk hair that i painted over. love texturing
so i'm not the best at skinning and rigging, but i can do it well enough for what i need and then tweak my skins and individual verts later. whichiswhatidid. i just used a basic biped, and then you know... skinned one side and copy pasted it to the other. i paid extra close attention to my finger joints, i've worked with posing a lot of models with different rigs and hands are always an issue, so i wanted to make sure it wasn't a big one on mine...still came out so so @_@
i think i did like...6 poses for her, i wanted something basic for the turnaround, nice and simple with a decent silhouette, and i wanted something a bit more "her" in the final, most of the other poses were just a stance and a gun, and then the other night i decided i wanted to try something different and threw her to the ground, she's a pretty neat character, lots of shooting and lots of torn clothes. she's pretty actiony so standing wasn't cutting it, so i blasted some epic music and ended up with that, had Jesse (skankerzero) help me push her expression some more, which i did in zbrush after everything else was set ^_^
i'm a vray person, and i've used marmoset and udk and stuff before back when i was still at school and occasionally on my own, but it's been a while, for this i decided to get my hands dirty with xoliul 2.0. (thank you Xoliul!) i've "messed" with it before, but that was nothing, so i spent about week of nights trying to figure out what i wanted after my maps were there, and then i tweaked my spec and reflection ever so lightly when needed. super neat shader, definitely amazing. i did come to the issue with the sorted alphas that you have to re-sort for proper displaying and had some weird shadow issues, but nothing that couldn't be fixed (xoliul has a section about how to get around alpha sorting stuff and other things.) totally worth it. i used two omni lights, white one as my main source and a blueish one as a nice edge light and then set my shader up as in the picture. i also made one for my AO/Normals shot, which actually had a desaturated version of my spec map.
i screen grabbed at 3000 pixels with ViewportGrabber script (thanks Ravenslayer!) getting my alphas and wires and then shrank my final shots down in photoshop after i complied everything together
shader setup:
final pose:
~Final Thoughts~
sad it's over, but glad i got a new fully finished piece for my portfolio great experience, Haz is a wonderful teacher and really worked with us, seeing him do paint and sculpt overs on my work really helped me understand where to go with her and why i should, a lot of the time i hear more of "don't do this or that because," people generally want to help you fix something that is wrong so you don't always get to hear a lot of "yeah, that's working, now keep doing that because", if we know what's good about a piece and why it's working, we can push the rest to the same level and that really clicks with me so i learned lots, tried out new things, and it was nice to go through a full high to low poly pipeline again, going to be doing that a lot more now. also made some new awesome friends, made some new awesome goals, and you know, made a new awesome character ^_^
really curious on how the spec works. I know the basic spec would be just blk/ white colours. Desaturated, but i seen a lot of people's spec map which contains colour in them. Is there a difference?
Great stuff! looks like lots of really good and smart topology going on. If I had to crit I would say that the yellow in the texture would look better as a more golden yellow with more of a range in it (especially for the metal parts). Looks a bit flat. And that bottom pose where she's on all fours isn't working.
I've seen many different ways to get better result on baking maps, but I always have to fix something "by hand", so thats really nice to hear from other artists how do they get things fixed!
I'm following this since the beginning, and it's really great to see that you finished with a such great model!
Congratulations and Thank you, this is a very very consistent breakdown, and I'm certainly that it will help all of us, beginners or not.
Marie: thank you! Jesse: thank yous, and thank you for all the help ^___^ Paul: thank you so much, i'm pretty happy with the textures too Jonah: thank you! XD David Wakelin: thank you so much, and is this what you were wanting to see?
Hang10: thank you so much! ^_^ Miles: thank yous! catzpaw164: i haven't really looked into it and i didn't consider printing her so i think i'd have to go through and rework some areas so things don't get printed hallow or too thin, but i'd have to do that later if anything :P Lee: thank you! ^____^ Rion411: thank you! Jessica Dinh: thank you so much Jessica! (love your work by the way) Iciban: i think more engines have a slot for a colored spec now, so they're being used a lot more, and i personally think they look nicer. but a black and white spec gives off white highlights, while a colored one gives off the colors that the pieces are in the map i turned my colored spec into a bw one for my ao/normal/wires turn around because if i kept the colored one, color would seep through and it'd look weird XD
there is also some great links in the the wiki about colored specs if you're interested http://wiki.polycount.com/SpecularColorMap?highlight=%28\bCategoryTexturing\b%29 Fomori: thank you! i completely agree, it's been a few days and now i'm no longer liking that final pose :P and about the yellow, i feel you on that too, i'm keeping it to remind myself to push my metals better next time around, i should have warmed them up more @_@ SimonT: thank you! i agree with you on the pose vikk0: awe thank you so much! i'm glad it helped out some, i wanted to document more of my issues because i too like knowing that i'm not the only one having them, and seeing how other artists approach them
this is for the showdown challenge on art by papercut, my thread: http://www.artbypapercut.com/forum/index.php?topic=33.0
made some amelia thumbs (you can ignore 1, i just wanted to try something :P), not 100% sure with what i want to go with yet, though i'm liking 2 of them, might mix and match possibly and then refine...any thoughts?
i'll post her possible weapons later
also here are some refs/inspirations (i'm pretty sure kato will be in every female reference sheet i will ever make @_@ )
ACE!
Not too sure about the boot protector things. They just feel a bit tacked on and don't really suite the character. I think a good boot would be much stronger (you could still add those cool little propeller bits, which is a nice touch by the way)
I'm glad you went with the fur trim. 2 & 7 were my favorites of your initial sketches.
Just a crazy idea, but I think it would be cool if her scarf was a lot longer. It could add a really dynamic element to her poses.
You could probably achieve the same kind of effect as the corset with just straps and the way the jacket is tailored with seams and stuff instead of having an actual corset piece. I really like corsets, but it doesn't say "aviator" to me.
The propeller is a cool idea for a weapon although it's a little plain looking at the moment and seems somewhat small. When I think of fighting games with crazy weapons I think of May from Guilty Gear with that gigantic anchor. Or not a fighting game, but Yuffie from Final Fantasy with her giant shuriken. It would be funny if she could spin the propeller really fast over her head and use it to fly around.
Lee: thank you! Duncan: thank you so much, yeah i was wondering if i wanted to keep them or not, i wanted them to push the silhouette and make it more interesting but i wasn't feeling it, so i drew out some boots XD Hai: i love May! and Millia! and guilty gear in general i kept thinking of them, but didn't push it >< i intentionally thought her scarf could act like Millia's hair and completely forgot about Yuffie, but that's pretty much how i saw her using the propeller, thank you so much for the ideas, they definitely helped
okay reworked some areas, really liking them a lot more, thanks for the feedback guys
reworked the propeller weapon, engraved it to look art deco-y and incorporated it into the coat trim, the scabbard, the scarf, and the boots as well, which have some fur to compliment the coat fur and the metals are now more brassy.
switched out the corset for belt/holster thing, the weapon is also now larger and the scarf is longer, liking the boot idea over the legwarmers, so i'll be taking those off
got all the base clothes stuff done in max and GoZed them into zbrush, i made them a bit more subdiveded than i usually do but it's working out okay so far (trying out new things, base is completely new, tried to match it with my lady m low poly head and better body topology for later)
i think i might (?) have issues with loops later when i'm low polying the sleeves (so puffy at the elbows) and skinning/rigging, and posing them but i'll deal with that once i get there.
everything is in progress, not sure about the hair structure, i'll revisit that like 10 more times before i'm done, i'm sure, i kind of like her being a baldy XD showdown wip thread
this is my Azra, my first attempt at a cinematic model, my art director let me work on her in between projects and whenever else i could squeeze her in. she was meant to be a learning process and a possible portfolio piece for us and me
she ended up being a huge learning experience, made me fall head over heels in love with armour
there are still some areas that bother me, but hopefully next time, now that i know the process better, i can watch out
comments and critiques much appreciated!
modeled in max and zbrush, unwrapped in headus uv layout, textured through zbrush and photoshop, casted in xnormal, and rendered in vray with a vray camera and vray lights
the head i ended up going with, did an angle shot to make sure it was working out:
my final render setup. i actually kept most of her armour and all of the chainmail in box mode to keep my computer from crying. also there are 2 vray lights, one excludes the skin but adds just a bit more to the rest of the scene the head i ended up going with, did an angle shot to make sure it was working out:
Great stuff Katia! Really love those Zbrush shots of her face. Minor crits - in the close up head shot, I think the sclera part of the eye is a bit too white and the edge of the iris colour is a bit too defined, a bit more reflection might help as well. Also in the high poly the fingers look fine, but in the rendered version they look too tapered at the tips --- just my 2 cents, hope that helps. Great work!
I wonder if there's some excessive shadowing going on between each eye and the nose. I think AO renders tend to be overly dark in that area, and it's something I typically paint out. The zbrush +polypaint model looks much gentler because it doesn't have that, I think.
Replies
Hang10: welcomes, and thank you so much!
Geneeeeeeeeeeeee: haha thanks, yeah they're hugee (sorry!
seth: thank you! and no problem, i'm always interested in seeing how others do it, so i decided i should share too :P
loveeeeeeeee kato
One thing that's bugging me is the corners of her mouth. They go on too long. They thin out and carry on way past her nice puffy lips. kind of gives her the look of the Joker. but also just kind of looks like she's been cut into her cheeks.
My own personal preference but her ears feel a bit too big.
Daniel: thanks!
Orangeknight: hey thanks for the note, yeah her face gets pretty angler in some areas, i was trying to interpret her from the cover art though i honestly just wanted to turn her into kato (white/black/orange/brown haired girl in the refs :P), on my next girl i'm definitely going to hit for softer features! thank you so much for the input, i'll make sure to keep a close eye on it while doing the low and make some adjustments
Curt: thank you so much!
Skummel: Awe thanks so much!
Fomori: her ears doooo look big still (i shrank them down a few times already :P) it might be the hair line playing a trick, but i'll make sure to pay extra attention to them and the lips in the low poly, thank you so much! ^____^
thanks guys!
wanted to take a break from everything, just a quick zbrush sketch
Elfving: thank you! i'm trying to get better at sculpting hair so it's nice to hear i'm getting somewhere
MGM: Thank you very much!
another quick sketckbook sculpt between workshop and work
for facial/hair practice:
kraemology: complete agree, thank! ^__^
Iciban: you're welcome and thank you!
~Final Low Poly~
okay so it's been a while since i've made a proper low poly (i usually work with controlled high polies, and decimated zbrush models unless the client provides a low, but then we have to rez it up for print purposes) and i spent a lot of time trying to figure out what i wanted built in and what i wanted floating, as well as where the loops were going to go for best animation. Haz helped me understand to simplify my shapes down, like the belt, it's all super layered in the high poly so i didn't know how i wanted to tackle that, but he did a nice paint over and now it's part of the pants with some extra floating pieces in the center
definitely enjoyed the process, learned a ton about good poly distribution so you don't get ugly shadow marks where there isn't enough polies to hold up the shape.
final low poly turnarounds:
wire shot with ao and normals:
on to casting! which is always a bit repetitive and a time consuming process, but is super crucial ^_^ i was trying out a few things here, figuring out what i can do so i have cleaner normals, i still ripped my high and low to shreds for good casts, but there wasn't very much fixing afterwards. for a few of the pieces i actually brought back into Zbrush and "projected all" so my low had become my high too (i tried to keep everything in quads as much as i could). this was mainly done for the face (and a few other pieces that made them cast a bit cleaner in xnormal), because i wasn't 100% happy with it and i wanted to re-sculpt it a bit (a lot), so i did in zbrush and then easily exported my high and low from the same mesh (that way i didn't have to retopo/adjust the head lots) and threw it into xNormal which was my casting tool of choice. i ripped my normals, ao, and my vertex colors (polypaint) and compiled everything in photoshop.
in max, i usually save out a wire shot (keep on screen mode) from the unwrap uvw and a black and white version (keep on multiply mode) as a better guide/map to my wires while i'm working. my polypaint helped a tonnnnnnn, then i just went in and painted more, kind of like i would for a 2d illustration. i had Haz take a look at my maps after i thought i was good with them, but i wasn't :P so i spent more hours leveling up some pieces to match the rest, harmonizing the values and trying to make sure stuff had things like material noise, scuff marks, wrinkles, highlights, good shadows and stuff like that
maps:
construction:
so i'm not the best at skinning and rigging, but i can do it well enough for what i need and then tweak my skins and individual verts later. whichiswhatidid. i just used a basic biped, and then you know... skinned one side and copy pasted it to the other. i paid extra close attention to my finger joints, i've worked with posing a lot of models with different rigs and hands are always an issue, so i wanted to make sure it wasn't a big one on mine...still came out so so @_@
i think i did like...6 poses for her, i wanted something basic for the turnaround, nice and simple with a decent silhouette, and i wanted something a bit more "her" in the final, most of the other poses were just a stance and a gun, and then the other night i decided i wanted to try something different and threw her to the ground, she's a pretty neat character, lots of shooting and lots of torn clothes. she's pretty actiony so standing wasn't cutting it, so i blasted some epic music and ended up with that, had Jesse (skankerzero) help me push her expression some more, which i did in zbrush after everything else was set ^_^
i'm a vray person, and i've used marmoset and udk and stuff before back when i was still at school and occasionally on my own, but it's been a while, for this i decided to get my hands dirty with xoliul 2.0. (thank you Xoliul!) i've "messed" with it before, but that was nothing, so i spent about week of nights trying to figure out what i wanted after my maps were there, and then i tweaked my spec and reflection ever so lightly when needed. super neat shader, definitely amazing. i did come to the issue with the sorted alphas that you have to re-sort for proper displaying and had some weird shadow issues, but nothing that couldn't be fixed (xoliul has a section about how to get around alpha sorting stuff and other things.) totally worth it. i used two omni lights, white one as my main source and a blueish one as a nice edge light and then set my shader up as in the picture. i also made one for my AO/Normals shot, which actually had a desaturated version of my spec map.
i screen grabbed at 3000 pixels with ViewportGrabber script (thanks Ravenslayer!) getting my alphas and wires and then shrank my final shots down in photoshop after i complied everything together
shader setup:
final pose:
so a big thanks to Hazardous, Mrskullface, Funky Bunnies, almighty_gir, Joe Benitez for creating Lady Mechanika, skankerzero, and everyone who took the time to follow this, thank you guys so much
I'm so proud of you Kat!
I dont suppose I could see a wire of the base?
would be nice to admire another persons base - currently researching them
I'm following this since the beginning, and it's really great to see that you finished with a such great model!
Congratulations and Thank you, this is a very very consistent breakdown, and I'm certainly that it will help all of us, beginners or not.
Thanks so much
Jesse: thank yous, and thank you for all the help ^___^
Paul: thank you so much, i'm pretty happy with the textures too
Jonah: thank you! XD
David Wakelin: thank you so much, and is this what you were wanting to see?
Hang10: thank you so much! ^_^
Miles: thank yous!
catzpaw164: i haven't really looked into it and i didn't consider printing her so i think i'd have to go through and rework some areas so things don't get printed hallow or too thin, but i'd have to do that later if anything :P
Lee: thank you! ^____^
Rion411: thank you!
Jessica Dinh: thank you so much Jessica! (love your work by the way)
Iciban: i think more engines have a slot for a colored spec now, so they're being used a lot more, and i personally think they look nicer. but a black and white spec gives off white highlights, while a colored one gives off the colors that the pieces are in the map
there is also some great links in the the wiki about colored specs if you're interested
Fomori: thank you! i completely agree, it's been a few days and now i'm no longer liking that final pose :P and about the yellow, i feel you on that too, i'm keeping it to remind myself to push my metals better next time around, i should have warmed them up more @_@
SimonT: thank you! i agree with you on the pose
vikk0: awe thank you so much! i'm glad it helped out some, i wanted to document more of my issues because i too like knowing that i'm not the only one having them, and seeing how other artists approach them
made some amelia thumbs (you can ignore 1, i just wanted to try something :P), not 100% sure with what i want to go with yet, though i'm liking 2 of them, might mix and match possibly and then refine...any thoughts?
i'll post her possible weapons later
also here are some refs/inspirations (i'm pretty sure kato will be in every female reference sheet i will ever make @_@ )
started on the anatomy sculpt and then did a paint over for my model sheet
showdown wip thread
knock it out of the park!
Not too sure about the boot protector things. They just feel a bit tacked on and don't really suite the character. I think a good boot would be much stronger (you could still add those cool little propeller bits, which is a nice touch by the way)
Cool weapon idea.
Great work, I am really keen to see some more.
Just a crazy idea, but I think it would be cool if her scarf was a lot longer. It could add a really dynamic element to her poses.
You could probably achieve the same kind of effect as the corset with just straps and the way the jacket is tailored with seams and stuff instead of having an actual corset piece. I really like corsets, but it doesn't say "aviator" to me.
The propeller is a cool idea for a weapon although it's a little plain looking at the moment and seems somewhat small. When I think of fighting games with crazy weapons I think of May from Guilty Gear with that gigantic anchor. Or not a fighting game, but Yuffie from Final Fantasy with her giant shuriken. It would be funny if she could spin the propeller really fast over her head and use it to fly around.
Duncan: thank you so much, yeah i was wondering if i wanted to keep them or not, i wanted them to push the silhouette and make it more interesting but i wasn't feeling it, so i drew out some boots XD
Hai: i love May! and Millia! and guilty gear in general
okay reworked some areas, really liking them a lot more, thanks for the feedback guys
reworked the propeller weapon, engraved it to look art deco-y and incorporated it into the coat trim, the scabbard, the scarf, and the boots as well, which have some fur to compliment the coat fur
switched out the corset for belt/holster thing, the weapon is also now larger and the scarf is longer, liking the boot idea over the legwarmers, so i'll be taking those off
i think i might (?) have issues with loops later when i'm low polying the sleeves (so puffy at the elbows) and skinning/rigging, and posing them but i'll deal with that once i get there.
everything is in progress, not sure about the hair structure, i'll revisit that like 10 more times before i'm done, i'm sure, i kind of like her being a baldy XD
showdown wip thread
she ended up being a huge learning experience, made me fall head over heels in love with armour
there are still some areas that bother me, but hopefully next time, now that i know the process better, i can watch out
comments and critiques much appreciated!
modeled in max and zbrush, unwrapped in headus uv layout, textured through zbrush and photoshop, casted in xnormal, and rendered in vray with a vray camera and vray lights
final pose: full size
head shot:
turnaround: full size
high poly: full size
maps:
the head i ended up going with, did an angle shot to make sure it was working out:
my final render setup. i actually kept most of her armour and all of the chainmail in box mode to keep my computer from crying. also there are 2 vray lights, one excludes the skin but adds just a bit more to the rest of the scene
Viktor: spasibo!! i've actually been drooling over Jason Martin's Blur stuff for months now, glad it rubbed off some
Also - gotta love Jason Martins work !!
Nice work!