Realistic female game mesh project - feedback much appreciated

fish4brains

Hi everyone, I'm a new member at polycount. I'm a games design student working on a 3d character project, which is near completion. What I'd love is some feedback on all aspects of the mesh and textures. I have a limit of 10,000 triangles for this project and the end result has to be showcased in the Unreal engine. Anyway, without any further ado here are some images from various stages of the project.

Base mesh (3dsMax)


Sculpt and polypaint (ZBrush)






Unwrap


re-topologised, textured mesh (UDK)





I don't want to spam with too many images in the same post (although I think I may have done that already) as this can take a while to load unless you have a super internet connection, but if there's anything that you're interested in seeing (certain angles, or maps) I can post these up.

Feedback, crit, etc all very very welcome, thankyou for your time

Ace-Angel

What references did you use? She currently looks like the tallest woman Gimili would ever sleep with and brag about with his friends.

Her proportions are off, she seems off balance, and materials looks like something that belong to a jade statue (too much SSS absorption and scatter).

So yeah, reference plox!

fish4brains

These references are from 3d.sk I checked the proportions during and after sculpting to make sure they were pretty close.

As I say I'm a student so in regards to the sub surface scattering I'm completely clueless. Could you give me any pointers for improvement or link me to any good tutorials on the subject.





quick demo (doesn't seem to loop I'm afraid, must have forgotten some setting or other)

SA_22

references proportions are really weird!... need to look into anatomy some, copying the outline of an image will only get you so far!

fabian roldan

Honestly, before sss tutorials or even texturing, i'd suggest you to improve your sculpting and modeling skills, making characters is much more complex than just taking a reference image and making a model over it following the silohouette. Learn everything about anatomy, fat, bones, skin, compression zones, muscles, proportions, and practice a lot, making some adjustments to that model won`t make it look better, it`s your general knowledege that is wrong right know, and improving won`t take you a day or a week...practice every day, all you can, study, analyze, learn from your mistakes and start again, and again, and again, and in a couple of years you`ll see a huge difference. Don`t get discouraged, practice and patience are the key.
And in any case you need some tutorial, just google what you want, there`s a lot of info out there at the reach of your hand by just taking the time to look for it

fish4brains

Thanks for the replies everyone, I think I'm starting to see the issues here. I've been studying anatomy for nearly a year now, although I understand that learning the human form is a lifelong task which requires continued practice, and a year is a comparatively short amount of time compared to most artists. I'll definitely be continuing to study anatomy and practising with sculpting.

My issue with Google is that for every good tutorial you find, there will be 10 bad/useless ones. I've seen tutorials which claim to be for beginners but assume you have prior knowledge of just about every tool and function within a software package, as well as tutorials which contain just plain mis-information. Often it can be difficult to find good tutorials unless you know where to look, and a lot of good tutorials are not free.

SA_22 - I'm not sure what you mean by the reference's proportions being weird, but I'd be interested to know more specifics.

If possible I'd also like people's opinions on the unwrap and topology. One of the requirements for this assignment is that the topology be suitable for animation. I've had a look on the wiki here at polycount and tried to follow the advice for the animation loops of the joins as best I could, but I have a feeling that they aren't quite right.
The unwrap is another one I'm not sure on as I've heard different things from different people; such as "never rotate any uv shells as this will mess up a normal map", "rotating uv shells by 90 degree increments is fine but rotations at arbitrary angles are not" and one lecturer has even said to "use whatever rotation allows you to get the best fit for uv efficiency" - he was using the example of a character unwrap, rotated at a 45 degree angle - I would assume that this would be normal mapped. With so many conflicting arguments it can be difficult to know whether you're doing something right or completely ballsing it up.

Ultimately I just want to keep on improving, as this is something I really enjoy doing - even if I suck at it right now ;P