cheeseontoast: well no and yes, i'm not using AO, because i think on characters AO mostly looks more like dirt then anything else (Ao is getting into every wrinkle, i hate that), i'm using GI baked from 2 directional skylights instead of ao, and no gradient maps. Besides that i'm using a custom made light dome that works good together with the gi to grab out the forms/shading better.
As for the cheating, no i don't think its cheating, because of some reasons. First of all i'm doing classical handpainting jobs too with no prebaking used, so i don't have to do it to prove me or somebody else anything (same goes to basemeshes, for humanoids i'm always using the same basemesh, which i didn't create, i used my own, found that this one was better, never thought of making a new one, because its a waste of time). The second reason is, all the shading information is already there, i can use it if needed (depending on the game/engine sometimes more sometimes less), why shouldn't i? Its stupid to waste your time with painting in shading that you've already created with the sculpt pass. I think its just normal that in these days where the sculpting takes up so much time that you need to use whatever information that sculpt is giving you, having normalmaps and shading created from the same highresmesh will always end up in cleaner results then trying to paint accordingly to the normalmap, if its about imperfections, well you can create those too underneath the shading, so i see no need for handpainting everything.
Inspirational stuff man, loving everything you touch, even your old stuff! i saw your marmoset renders, you got a good reflection going on the eyes - how did you get that ?
hazardous: sorry for the laaaaate answer its just specular, though on my laptop i don't have reflection either and only spec, guess its a hardwarething
ok here is a new load of stuff
In 2008 and 2009 i worked on "Settlers7" by Ubisoft and Bluebyte, after my work on Settlers 6 and the addon it was again quite a huge workload i've got offered.
This time it was way too much for me to work on it alone. Stephan Stölting joined me and later Adina Krause helped out here and there when we still didn't get it finished fast enough.
In the end we worked on approx. 130 assets, bodies, heads, sequence characters, portraits and props.
It's the first time ever, that it's hard for me to tell who worked on which Asset, as often we switched back and forth during the revision process. I modelled every Asset, but normally I modelled one asset, Stephan then started texturing it while i worked on the next one.
So we made a deal, he tells everyone that he did the coolest assets of the bunch, and i'm going to do the same.
To speed up the workflow bluebyte already delivered us faceless nude bodytypes, which we didn't touch at all, textures and topology had been set in the very early stages of the production.
Thanks to Michael Filipowsky as lead character artist for all his guidance and sometimes very honest critique, again i learned a lot. Also i'd like to thank Ben Mathis (yeah you poop!), who joined the team during the production for helping me with his advices during the revision process.
the stonegolem, the only char that has a normalmap, as he is so huge, i also built a shader for detailnormals so it doesn't get too pixelated when zooming in
portraits for the game
the sequence characters
there are quite some more on my website in the settlers section, didn't want to flood the forums, but i could if you are too lazy to go over to my site
Hey man, the best part about going through this thread was how your skills just constantly grew greater and greater with each new update. Seriously inspiring to see my man!
Now then, on to business: Tell us how you're going to display this in a portfolio. With something as solid as this - where you go from VERY GOOD, to GREAT work - is going to be a good exercise in showcasing. Keep us posted!
jason: thank you but i have to admit taht the colours have been set before we started texturing, the conceptartists did a great job and michael prededfined some basic rules for every artist to work with, skintones and such things were defined pretty early, but yes i agree i like the colorpalatte too
adam: i'm not quite sure if i can follow you o_O
divi: ok but just as links for the lazy people
i chose the 3 representive pictures as those have been the most complex characters, also some of our characters didn't have the final body skintextures as some of them have been refined and changed during the production at bluebyte, they made sure that the final textures get into the texturesheets in the final product, therefore all the unwraps had to stay 100% the same, at least for the skin parts
EricV: even though we don't live far from each other ( i could meet him every day by accident just 5min from home) i've never met him and only worked from his concepts supplied by bluebyte, strange digital world :P
Great stuff! It's awesome to see stylized, hand painted characters executed so well. I haven't played a Settlers game since the original on the Amiga. Maybe I should give it a try...
bloodmoon, here are some i hope representative wirefrimes and Textureflats of:
Countrybumpkin Rupert, my favorite character Portrait
~1300 triangles - 512² texturesheet
King Konradin, my favorite sequence Character
~3500 triangles - 1024² texturesheet
The Stone Golem, a huge special character
~12k triangles - 2048² texturesheet
and the baker, a ordinary, thin character
~900 triangles - 1024² texturesheet (though that got scaled down to 512 in the final game i guess)
the texture might seem like a lot of wasted space, but the premise was to have every character use the same texture density, therefore, the biggest dude, with the most surface area used the texturesheet the best. Also Bluebyte wanted to add props and things that relate to the characters onto these sheets, so the texturepage might have changed after we delivered.
long answer, we had pretty detailled concepts for most of the characters.
So what i did with modelling is take approx. the perspective the concept was done in, screengrab it, align it in ps, have a layer with the concept and tried to match them as close as possible without making them look too strange in the 3d version, switching back and forth between max and PS to align them better.
There is no way to make it work 100% like the concept, at this point the model was still 100% symmetrical to make texturing easier.
So after the model was done and unwrapped, I took it to deeppaint (any 3d painter would do it) projected the concept onto it. and started cleaning in the premdade colourpalette for the lowpolies.
*searching for a file, that still is pretty untouched on the base layer*
*found one!*
so after the symmetrical model with the slapped on concept was cleaned by either me or stephan, I took it, and did the asymmetrical parts, rebaked the texture and from there on one of us finished the model, then it went to bluebyte, they made their comments and critiques.
We then fixed the issues, sent it back to them, in the beginning we had more revisions, later in the production it was just this pass. So we got the feedback, fixed it and then i worked on the normals for the characters.
No not normalmaps, the first production ever where i hand edited the normals for a character to make the shading look better ingame, thats also why we had a few chamfered edges here and there to controll the shading better, took me quite a bit to get my head wrapped around that, but it really pays off:
as for the golem: yes as he was so huge and all the environments use normalmaps we decided to use a normalmap for him too so i sculpted him in zbrush using zspheres.
For the very lowpolies it doesn't work as good, as you have less detailled and bigger areas. However it still gives a solid starting point, in the end you still have to repaint everything as the colourpalette is different in the concept and its more important to have every character fit together ingame, in the concepts sometimes the light changed or was overcast and such things.
Some characters also changed quite a bit during the 3d development and the concepts have been drawn more freely then using the same basemesh as we had to use.
So we then had to make the concept work on the characters proportions, and the ealier concepts have been much rougher, there was always one finished concept per class and the others where very rough in comparison, of course it wouldn't give you not that much help then, but its still a valid starting point.
ok as some images of this project have been published lately i decided to publish my stuff too.
Its a project i worked on for Radonlabs in early 2009, i was hired to update an already existing character, due to this, the proportions were already set, so what i did is create a new basemesh with the needed proportions and reworked everything from scratch around that.
I have no final shots from the clients engine, so here is my stuff, i think the hair used softalpha in their engine, for my presentation i used marmoset with hard alpha.
During the process the face changed a lot, so the sculpts might not be synched with the final shot i gave the client
Also in early 2009 i did some stuff for Drakensang2: The River of Time for Radonlabs and dtp.
I basicly had to create some new outfits and sometimes haircuts for their Charactersystem
and something very evil, also from early 2009
for some sort of cell ringtone evil video stuff but it opened me some doors for filmstuff, which i cannot show yet...
but in case of the knight i would have loved to have more freedom proportionwise, but well i'm just the deliverer and they already had the rig and anims...
Replies
I'll be looking forward to seeing more stuff from you
cheeseontoast: well no and yes, i'm not using AO, because i think on characters AO mostly looks more like dirt then anything else (Ao is getting into every wrinkle, i hate that), i'm using GI baked from 2 directional skylights instead of ao, and no gradient maps. Besides that i'm using a custom made light dome that works good together with the gi to grab out the forms/shading better.
As for the cheating, no i don't think its cheating, because of some reasons. First of all i'm doing classical handpainting jobs too with no prebaking used, so i don't have to do it to prove me or somebody else anything (same goes to basemeshes, for humanoids i'm always using the same basemesh, which i didn't create, i used my own, found that this one was better, never thought of making a new one, because its a waste of time). The second reason is, all the shading information is already there, i can use it if needed (depending on the game/engine sometimes more sometimes less), why shouldn't i? Its stupid to waste your time with painting in shading that you've already created with the sculpt pass. I think its just normal that in these days where the sculpting takes up so much time that you need to use whatever information that sculpt is giving you, having normalmaps and shading created from the same highresmesh will always end up in cleaner results then trying to paint accordingly to the normalmap, if its about imperfections, well you can create those too underneath the shading, so i see no need for handpainting everything.
ok here is a new load of stuff
In 2008 and 2009 i worked on "Settlers7" by Ubisoft and Bluebyte, after my work on Settlers 6 and the addon it was again quite a huge workload i've got offered.
This time it was way too much for me to work on it alone.
Stephan Stölting joined me and later Adina Krause helped out here and there when we still didn't get it finished fast enough.
In the end we worked on approx. 130 assets, bodies, heads, sequence characters, portraits and props.
It's the first time ever, that it's hard for me to tell who worked on which Asset, as often we switched back and forth during the revision process. I modelled every Asset, but normally I modelled one asset, Stephan then started texturing it while i worked on the next one.
So we made a deal, he tells everyone that he did the coolest assets of the bunch, and i'm going to do the same.
To speed up the workflow bluebyte already delivered us faceless nude bodytypes, which we didn't touch at all, textures and topology had been set in the very early stages of the production.
Thanks to Michael Filipowsky as lead character artist for all his guidance and sometimes very honest critique, again i learned a lot. Also i'd like to thank Ben Mathis (yeah you poop!), who joined the team during the production for helping me with his advices during the revision process.
the stonegolem, the only char that has a normalmap, as he is so huge, i also built a shader for detailnormals so it doesn't get too pixelated when zooming in
portraits for the game
the sequence characters
there are quite some more on my website in the settlers section, didn't want to flood the forums, but i could if you are too lazy to go over to my site
thank you for inspiration, Steffen.
Now then, on to business: Tell us how you're going to display this in a portfolio. With something as solid as this - where you go from VERY GOOD, to GREAT work - is going to be a good exercise in showcasing. Keep us posted!
awesome stuff. absolutely needs to be in that top row thingie!
ged: yeah i like this style also alot more
jason: thank you but i have to admit taht the colours have been set before we started texturing, the conceptartists did a great job and michael prededfined some basic rules for every artist to work with, skintones and such things were defined pretty early, but yes i agree i like the colorpalatte too
adam: i'm not quite sure if i can follow you o_O
divi: ok but just as links for the lazy people
i chose the 3 representive pictures as those have been the most complex characters, also some of our characters didn't have the final body skintextures as some of them have been refined and changed during the production at bluebyte, they made sure that the final textures get into the texturesheets in the final product, therefore all the unwraps had to stay 100% the same, at least for the skin parts
http://polyphobia.de/html/wordpress/wp-content/gallery/settlers7/settlers_generals.jpg
http://polyphobia.de/html/wordpress/wp-content/gallery/settlers7/settlers_cavalier.jpg
http://polyphobia.de/html/wordpress/wp-content/gallery/settlers7/settlers_soldiers.jpg
http://polyphobia.de/html/wordpress/wp-content/gallery/settlers7/settlers_cannoneers.jpg
http://polyphobia.de/html/wordpress/wp-content/gallery/settlers7/settlers_marauders.jpg
http://polyphobia.de/html/wordpress/wp-content/gallery/settlers7/settlers_clerus.jpg
http://polyphobia.de/html/wordpress/wp-content/gallery/settlers7/settlers_merchants.jpg
http://polyphobia.de/html/wordpress/wp-content/gallery/settlers7/settlers_miller_baker.jpg
http://polyphobia.de/html/wordpress/wp-content/gallery/settlers7/settlers_weaver_coiner.jpg
http://polyphobia.de/html/wordpress/wp-content/gallery/settlers7/settlers_constructor.jpg
http://polyphobia.de/html/wordpress/wp-content/gallery/settlers7/settlers_blacksmith_charburner.jpg
http://polyphobia.de/html/wordpress/wp-content/gallery/settlers7/settlers_farmer.jpg
http://polyphobia.de/html/wordpress/wp-content/gallery/settlers7/settlers_carriers.jpg
Love the portraits.
I like how clean and sharp the texturing is, man you nailed bounce lights, reflection and most of all expression in the diffuse.
Very very impressive and inspiring, thanks for the share!
http://manarama.deviantart.com/
some cool stuff i haven't seen before, damn some of them should have been mine
Spark
thank you very much guys
- BoBo
Really inspiring stuff!
Very well done shading, lighting and style on the textures. Total envy to your patience creating so much assets in one such nice line of style.
saved
bloodmoon, here are some i hope representative wirefrimes and Textureflats of:
Countrybumpkin Rupert, my favorite character Portrait
~1300 triangles - 512² texturesheet
King Konradin, my favorite sequence Character
~3500 triangles - 1024² texturesheet
The Stone Golem, a huge special character
~12k triangles - 2048² texturesheet
and the baker, a ordinary, thin character
~900 triangles - 1024² texturesheet (though that got scaled down to 512 in the final game i guess)
the texture might seem like a lot of wasted space, but the premise was to have every character use the same texture density, therefore, the biggest dude, with the most surface area used the texturesheet the best. Also Bluebyte wanted to add props and things that relate to the characters onto these sheets, so the texturepage might have changed after we delivered.
have "you" painted the hair of the boy 100% by hand?
and is the stone golem based on a sculpt?
long answer, we had pretty detailled concepts for most of the characters.
So what i did with modelling is take approx. the perspective the concept was done in, screengrab it, align it in ps, have a layer with the concept and tried to match them as close as possible without making them look too strange in the 3d version, switching back and forth between max and PS to align them better.
There is no way to make it work 100% like the concept, at this point the model was still 100% symmetrical to make texturing easier.
So after the model was done and unwrapped, I took it to deeppaint (any 3d painter would do it) projected the concept onto it. and started cleaning in the premdade colourpalette for the lowpolies.
*searching for a file, that still is pretty untouched on the base layer*
*found one!*
this is how it looked like with the concept slapped onto the model
and the cleaning process:
http://www.polyphobia.de/nonpublic/jobs/2008/bluebyte/siedler7/alchimist.gif
so after the symmetrical model with the slapped on concept was cleaned by either me or stephan, I took it, and did the asymmetrical parts, rebaked the texture and from there on one of us finished the model, then it went to bluebyte, they made their comments and critiques.
We then fixed the issues, sent it back to them, in the beginning we had more revisions, later in the production it was just this pass. So we got the feedback, fixed it and then i worked on the normals for the characters.
No not normalmaps, the first production ever where i hand edited the normals for a character to make the shading look better ingame, thats also why we had a few chamfered edges here and there to controll the shading better, took me quite a bit to get my head wrapped around that, but it really pays off:
as for the golem: yes as he was so huge and all the environments use normalmaps we decided to use a normalmap for him too so i sculpted him in zbrush using zspheres.
Thanks for your explanation. very interesting :thumbup:
Some characters also changed quite a bit during the 3d development and the concepts have been drawn more freely then using the same basemesh as we had to use.
So we then had to make the concept work on the characters proportions, and the ealier concepts have been much rougher, there was always one finished concept per class and the others where very rough in comparison, of course it wouldn't give you not that much help then, but its still a valid starting point.
i love the style of those last cartoony characters, they have a lot of personality
tnx for sharing
ok as some images of this project have been published lately i decided to publish my stuff too.
Its a project i worked on for Radonlabs in early 2009, i was hired to update an already existing character, due to this, the proportions were already set, so what i did is create a new basemesh with the needed proportions and reworked everything from scratch around that.
I have no final shots from the clients engine, so here is my stuff, i think the hair used softalpha in their engine, for my presentation i used marmoset with hard alpha.
During the process the face changed a lot, so the sculpts might not be synched with the final shot i gave the client
Also in early 2009 i did some stuff for Drakensang2: The River of Time for Radonlabs and dtp.
I basicly had to create some new outfits and sometimes haircuts for their Charactersystem
and something very evil, also from early 2009
for some sort of cell ringtone evil video stuff but it opened me some doors for filmstuff, which i cannot show yet...
Your work always oozes style, really inspirational.
but in case of the knight i would have loved to have more freedom proportionwise, but well i'm just the deliverer and they already had the rig and anims...