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[MUTANT] Table Tennis, Swizzle

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polycounter lvl 15
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Swizzle polycounter lvl 15
Mutant ping pong to the death, bitches.

IHYYF.jpg

I'm thinking of giving him some armor and stuff and having the shirt and shorts stretched over the top. Dunno how well it'd work visually, though, so we'll see what happens.

Replies

  • AliasOpilo
    Haha, i like this! One of my concepts is very similar but with more arms :P
  • skankerzero
    I like.

    has a couple similarities to mine. I will adjust.
  • ScudzAlmighty
    Awesome Swizzle,

    It might be cool, to break up the symmetry there, if you move one of his arms to his back or something, and maybe even 3 arms on one side, 1 on the other? just to break up that silhouette and get away from the more typical 4-armed dude design.
  • Swizzle
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    Swizzle polycounter lvl 15
    Thanks, guys.

    I agree, Scudz, so I've adjusted the concept. I definitely like this version a lot better; I feel like it has a bit more distinctive character. I'm not entirely sold on the color scheme, but I guess I can pretty easily change that when it comes time to texture. I've been considering making his skin bright red or something.

    seTDw.jpg

    And here's a couple of hours of work on the model. I'm going for straight low-poly and hand-painted textures on this one since I really need the practice and it's been too damn long since I got to work on a personal project.

    eu0hA.jpg

    It's already almost at 2000 tris, so I may have to cut back a little from his hands, but that's still up in the air at the moment.
  • skankerzero
    model the hands closed.
  • MichaelF
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    MichaelF polycounter lvl 11
    I think you are spending way to meany polys on the hands, also think you could cut a bit back on the head :)
    But it looks badass
  • Sirdelita
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    Sirdelita polycounter lvl 10
    I'm definitely pumped for this one.
  • Dan!
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    Dan! polycounter lvl 6
    looks fun, cant wait.
  • Tadao215
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    Tadao215 polycounter lvl 13
    lol, nice concept :thumbup:
  • ScudzAlmighty
    model the hands closed.

    agreed. Maybe even model two of them closed and keep the top right hand simplified but open. Dunno what else you could trim without some legs on im, but looking forward to how you solve the third arm anatomy problemwithout just slapping a shoulder onto his ribs. Spacemonkey (surprise surprise) has done it a couple different ways that I always found refreshing, post and thread, sadly too many of them are sketches and not geo.
  • Swizzle
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    Swizzle polycounter lvl 15
    Sirdelita, Dan!, Tadao215:
    Thanks, guys!

    skankerzero:
    I'd been considering this, and the only reason I didn't initially is because I'd like there to be some possibility of hand gestures. However...

    MichaelF:
    Aye, head and hands need more optimization. I'll get to that once I have the rest of the body modeled out, though.

    ScudzAlmighty:
    You read my goddamn mind. I was debating modeling all the hands closed, but I wanted at least one of them to be able to point and gesture.

    Modeling two closed and one open has some problems, though: I want to fit all the arms into the same UV space so that I can have more space for the head and the rest of the body in general. In addition, I'd like to have the fewest UV islands possible, at least for this project, because I'm trying to improve my UV mapping techniques and I want to experiment a little.

    So, basically, I'm going to put the closed hands and the modeled hand into the same UV space and I'll try to model and unwrap them so that the same texture works for both the fists and the open hand. It's a stupid, crazy plan that simply wouldn't work with most normal mapping and such, but to hell with it. Hand painted all the way, bishes!
  • skankerzero
    model two closed and one as a 'mitten'.

    uv your hands so the fingers are straight. this way you can uvmap them and use the same texture across all the hands.

    hand.jpg

    it's a little difficult to illustrate without actually just showing you how it works out on a model. you should get the jist though.
  • Swizzle
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    Swizzle polycounter lvl 15
    You actually described it pretty much exactly how I plan on doing it, skank.
  • skankerzero
  • Sean VanGorder
    Sweeet. I feel like he needs a headband.
  • Swizzle
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    Swizzle polycounter lvl 15
    Oh, hell yes. And wrist bands! Yesssss!
  • MFTituS
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    MFTituS polycounter lvl 6
    yeah, ping pong for the win! cool idea and great silhouette with the three arms.
  • Swizzle
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    Swizzle polycounter lvl 15
    Thanks, MFTituS.


    Got a bit of a model update here. It's currently at 2598 tris, by the way, so I need to cut it down some.

    7wYfg.jpg
  • MattQ86
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    MattQ86 polycounter lvl 14
    Already this is looking great.

    I think the rules allow some wiggle-room with the polycount so you should be fine.
  • skankerzero
    Swizzle wrote: »
    Thanks, MFTituS.


    Got a bit of a model update here. It's currently at 2598 tris, by the way, so I need to cut it down some.

    7wYfg.jpg
    I see some poliiiieeeeeesssssss that can be removed~~~


    namely from the knuckles on the inside of the fist.you can optimize that quite a bit.
  • Tadao215
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    Tadao215 polycounter lvl 13
    looking forward to seeing this one textured
  • Swizzle
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    Swizzle polycounter lvl 15
    MattQ86:
    I'm kind of anal when it comes to optimization, so I'm definitely keeping it under or at 2500 tris just out of sheer principle.

    skankerzero:
    I actually got it down to under 2500 with two paddles included, so I think it's going to be just fine. I'm almost certainly going to be optimizing the living hell out of those fists and pumping more detail into the silhouette over the next few days, though. I also need to give the elbows on the smaller arms some polygonal lovin' as well.

    Tadao215:
    Thanks! I'm definitely looking forward to texturing it because there are a few things I want to try with folds and gradients. I'd also like to experiment with some colors and shading techniques that I haven't used before.


    EDIT:

    Quick update. It's currently at 2463 tris, but at the expense of some shape in the legs and small arms. I'm going to dump a few more cuts back into the shins and elbows and try to get things to where they'll deform cleanly. I also need to do more optimizing in the fists since there's some detail in there that doesn't add to the silhouette and also doesn't affect a lot of internal parallax.

    X9yiS.jpg
  • ScudzAlmighty
    internal parallax sounds like the name of a bad 90's grunge/industrial band.

    Looks good so far Swizzle, looking forward to your colour and shading experiments.
  • obeyurnapster
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    obeyurnapster polycounter lvl 9
    yup, cool model
  • EtotheRic
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    EtotheRic polycounter lvl 18
    Looking good so far. Might want to add an edge to his upper left shoulder as well when you add your deformation geometry. You could also cut a bunch from the paddle by making the handle a cube and the paddle not welded but a 16 triangle disc that just intersects the handle.
  • Dan!
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    Dan! polycounter lvl 6
    nailed it can't wait to see this progress.
  • leslievdb
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    leslievdb polycounter lvl 15
    hehe cool idea and model so far, keeping an eye on this one
  • specsowl
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    specsowl polycounter lvl 6
    I love this concept so much :D I'll be keeping a close watch on this thread. kutgw
  • Norron
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    Norron polycounter lvl 13
    I expect great things from this thread. You'd best not let us down. :)
  • Sirdelita
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    Sirdelita polycounter lvl 10
    Right arm much bigger, the proportions in the concept were super great and had a ton of personality!
  • Swizzle
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    Swizzle polycounter lvl 15
    obeyurnapster, Dan!, Ravenslayer, specsowl:
    Thanks!

    ScudzAlmighty:
    It does sound kinda grungy, doesn't it?

    EtotheRic:
    Done and done!

    Norron:
    Great, no pressure here. :poly122:

    Sirdelita:
    I made the right arm bigger and the left arms smaller. Better now?



    Progress has been slow over the past few days because of various real-life obligations like having a girlfriend and eating pizza while playing Skyrim. Anyway, I've adjusted some of the proportions and done various optimizations everywhere.

    It's not very visible in these screens, but the fists are much less detailed than they were. You're not going to see the inner fists very much, or at least you wouldn't in a game, so I sacrificed stuff in there to make things happen elsewhere.

    I'm about to start UV mapping. Oh lord, help me in my time of need.

    [EDIT: It's at 2499 tris right now, by the way]

    Q0vb5.jpg
  • skankerzero
    Swizzle wrote: »
    I'm about to start UV mapping. Oh lord, help me in my time of need.

    if you use headusuv you could unwrap that in 15 minutes or less!
  • Swizzle
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    Swizzle polycounter lvl 15
    It's not that I have a problem with my current toolset — Modo has some pretty excellent UV tools, actually — it's that I'm trying to make the UVs as efficient as possible. While I can do some pretty nifty packing and stretching and relaxing and such in Modo, a lot of it's just coming down to manual tweaking along with selective relaxing and stuff to eliminate weird stretching errors.

    If I was just hurrying through the unwrap, I'd probably spend about 15-20 minutes on it, tweak it for about the same amount of time, and then call it done.
  • Sirdelita
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    Sirdelita polycounter lvl 10
  • duncan
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    duncan polycounter lvl 11
    I love this guy. I am really excited to see where he goes texture wise.
  • MGrecke
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    MGrecke polycounter lvl 7
    So far great progress, and changing to a bigger arm was way better!
    and im also really excited to see how the textures will look like!
  • ScudzAlmighty
    Looking good Swizzle, the proportional balance once this guy is posed is gonna be epic :)



    p.s. you're not gonna name him Gene by any chance are you?
  • Norron
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    Norron polycounter lvl 13
    I really like the proportions and volumes of the limbs you're making. Looks great.

    Can't wait to see dem UV's.
  • Baddcog
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    Baddcog polycounter lvl 9
    Great shapes all around. The hands are really sweet. I notice you have a lot of tris, so no sculpting?
  • skylebones
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    skylebones polycounter lvl 10
    Love this swizzle! And I'm glad to see someone else go straight to the low poly and hand painted. Started to feel like the only one skipping the high poly.
  • Swizzle
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    Swizzle polycounter lvl 15
    Sirdelita, duncan, MGrecke:
    Thanks!

    ScudzAlmighty:
    Hmmm, Gene... I may just have to call him that.

    Norron:
    I should have the UVs at least mostly done soon; lot of stuff taking up my time lately. I'll make sure to explain some of the choices I made regarding the UV layout. Some of the things I've done are going to seem kind of unintuitive at first.

    Baddcog:
    Nope, no sculpting. I really need to practice my hand-painted textures, so I'm using this to do that to a pretty extreme degree. There's been zero sculpting whatsoever aside from the very basic rough blockout of the head that I retopologized all to hell to get what you see there.

    skylebones:
    I'm actually a little surprised that more people aren't doing straight painted stuff. In a lot of cases it's simply less time-consuming than sculpting something and doing retopo.




    Unfortunately I haven't had a lot of time to work on this over the past few days. A lot of obligations have kept me from being able to work on personal projects lately. I should be able to update again on Sunday when I actually have time to get some work done. :poly122:
  • Swizzle
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    Swizzle polycounter lvl 15
    Now, where was I with this?

    Oh, yeah...

    TRBLF.jpg

    lhqso.jpg

    Just a few hours of noodling with the textures. Nothing's final yet and I'm probably going to drastically change the color scheme. I'm considering doing red for his skin, but I'm undecided as yet. I also have a variant with some strong light coming from below (a hint of which can be seen on his face), but I don't know how good it would look when it's posed.

    There are numerous issues I need to fix, but the biggest one that really stands out at the moment is getting the top of the sock straight on the UVs. I don't know why I didn't do that before, but I'll fix it soon enough. It's a silly mistake.

    I really wish I could use some of that empty space on the UV map, but I really need a lot of it because of mipmaps and texture filtering. If I don't have that much space in there, the edges of the UV islands become extremely apparent at glancing angles.
  • Jeff Parrott
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    Jeff Parrott polycounter lvl 19
    WoW! The shading on the skin is coming out great so far. Love the way you're faking the spec.
  • Sukotto
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    Sukotto polycounter lvl 8
    Looking nice so far. Is the texture all done in Photoshop or some other program?
  • skankerzero
    i love the horrible pattern on the top. <3
  • Sirdelita
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    Sirdelita polycounter lvl 10
    Yeah you should definitely play with the palette a bit- Shading looks tits tho :)
  • Swizzle
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    Swizzle polycounter lvl 15
    jeffro:
    Thanks!

    Sukotto:
    Yup, it's all Photoshop. I've been trying to build up my hand-painting skills, so I've avoided doing any projection painting or anything of the sort even though it'd probably make life easier. I'm doing things the hard way so that I can get better at the easy way later on.

    skankerzero:
    I do too. I reeeeeaaally want to make his outfit as cheesy as possible, so he's definitely going to have some shitty 80s-style halftones and stuff once I'm done.

    Sirdelita:
    Aye, the palette could definitely use some work, so that's what I'm doing right now. I have enough of a solid base going that I'm now playing around with color and contrast, trying to get things to read well.


    Working on some variations. I whipped the muscle variant up pretty quick with some gradient map tomfoolery in Photoshop, so there was minimal painting necessary. If anybody's unfamiliar with using gradient maps, I'd be glad to do a short writeup on how to use them effectively.

    iAlnN.jpg
  • Norron
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    Norron polycounter lvl 13
    Green and purple feels lime the natural coloring for this guy. Nice start to the textures man.
  • Baddcog
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    Baddcog polycounter lvl 9
    I like the green and purple better to, but maybe yellow would look great on the red. Having raw muscle on the red would look pretty sick.
  • Dylan Brady
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    Dylan Brady polycounter lvl 9
    the red makes him look more demonic. not as much with the mutant theme maybe?
    but i love the green
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