Characters, for my demo reel.
I am working on some characters for a game at my school, and for my demo reel. The style is suppose to be clean, and colorful. Think of Mirror's edge meets portal. The characters look like their concept. But I really want to make sure my textures look good. This is so far what I've got.
Characters:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/88685465/Wake%20Characters.png
Characters:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/88685465/Wake%20Characters.png
Replies
I would not make blanket, unhelpful statements like this.
This forum is built around the idea that you provide feedback, not dumb shit like this. That post was useless and I'd encourage you to actually think about what you post before you post it.
Anyway.
JohnRogeles, I think you can do a few things to improve your presentation. First and foremost, I'd work on getting your character into some sort of natural pose if you're going to put it in a portfolio. This can be helpful for people viewing the portfolio because it will give a better idea of what the character would look like in a game.
When presenting a portfolio piece, it's often a good idea to do it on a reasonably dark, solid background. This helps give the viewer a good idea of what they're looking at, and makes it so the background isn't fighting with the character for your attention.
It appears the character is using all one smoothing group. This is fine for a lot of characters, though it looks like your normal maps were created with smoothing groups in mind. I'd suggest trying to get the smoothing right so your normals look the best they possibly can.
It looks like some areas of the character are probably supposed to glow, so I'd encourage you to make glow maps and apply them so we can get a better idea of how the final character will look.
If you're trying to emulate a certain style in your presentation, try looking at some of the lighting from the original to get a good idea of how you could light your character to make it feel like it's a part of that universe. Both Portal and Mirror's Edge have very distinct lighting, so try and get closer to the mood of them.
Finally, I'd really like to see some wireframes of your character so we can get a good idea of how it's constructed.
what im telling is, you simply dont want to put something that shows nothing but average skills into something which you want to land a job for you. You are a character artist, fine, where can i see some amazing knowledge of anatomy and other required skills like hard surface modeling for an armour or something?
So chill people, gosh
Nobody is being hateful, you're just posting useless bullshit. As Swizzle said, think about what you are posting BEFORE you post it. You are blatantly unhelpful and rude. Don't tell anyone their art shouldn't go into a portfolio without posting some useful crits or suggestions.
As for the character, I think the hard surface bits look kinda blobby and soft, but fixing the smoothing groups _may_ help that. Also, the color schemes with the stripes along the hard surface parts comes off as slightly noisy and doesn't really look coherent in my opinion.
I would focus on really cleaning up the normals and bakes to make sure all your hard surface bits look crisp and clean before moving on to the textures!
Good luck!
Keep it up!
Think about the overall theme and design of your characters. Try to use repetitive shapes that will act as motifs in the over all design, and also try to have breaks on your design. What I'm seeing right now is very somewhat continuous and not enough "big reads" on the upper torso and the leg area(your grays tend to blend together, use some edging on your textures).
Also think about edges. Everything seems to be kind of in this clay like material you have. The edges on the armor do not scream out plating or hard surfaces. I suggest to revisit your armor modeling and fix this. Texturing your edges properly would also add a lot in how it reads.
Color. Your design lacks a bit of readable geo that would be discernible from a distance. Remember that game-res is much smaller than we perceive it to be. Big blocks of color will differentiate different parts of the body, and as well as have it to be readable from far. Also keep your color schemes to a certain limit that works well with each other. I suggest looking up that DOTA2 pfd from the Steam Workshop. It's a guide on how to have effective character designs for that game.
As for presentation, rig your models and pose them to have a bit of personality to them. It's really not that hard to learn rigging and skinning and you would have to learn it anyways in order to know what is a good way of modeling limbs at certain circumstances. For poses, try to draw your character's personality on paper and proceed from there.
Good luck, mang.