Character : Dream Painter WIP
Hello everyone, I finished up on my first pass on a new character model, and wanted to get some feedback while I'm doing optimization and what not. This is an original character, the dream painter. It is a whimsical character that flies to us at night and paints our dreams out of our memories. I really want to make sure I capture youth and innocence in this character.
Concepts
And here is the mesh.
I am already unhappy with the hands, they will be the first thing I address.
This is just the first geometry hammered out, not finished yet. Any and all feedback would be great.
Concepts
And here is the mesh.
I am already unhappy with the hands, they will be the first thing I address.
This is just the first geometry hammered out, not finished yet. Any and all feedback would be great.
Replies
- BoBo
@bugo - I've tweaked the face a bit, rounded out the jaw and brought those cheeks in. It looks better already.
I also made some changes to the hands, trying to clean them up.
The updated hand...
The updated face...
And the overall
I'm afraid to try to cut out too much of the geometry since I am for the most part happy with the shapes I have.
Here is the character's silhouette, in case anyone was curious.
Careful with the face tho - I can't tell for sure since the wireframe hides most of the shading but you might get a weird joker look with shapes described like that. I think that the polygon strips curling way up from the sides of the nose should actually go down... somehow in the direction of an imaginary line one can feel from the corner of the nose to the angle of the lower jawbone if I make myself clear :P
@Pior - I see what your saying, it happens a little bit in the shade. I'll change the edgeflow to correct it in the next update.
Here are the images.
I'm working on the unwrap now, as well as a paint of the concept art so I make sure I have all of my colors worked out. I'll post those up soon.
I also took the opportunity to block out the hair (the previous hair geo was temporary) but I ran into some problems right away so I wanted to get some feedback from the communities. The first hair I painted was too realistic looking for the character, so I created a second hair texture. I think the second hair texture looks better, but still didn't match the style of the character. The third hair I made, while more in line with the stylized, painted feel of the character, Seems simplistic to me.
Any feedback or ideas for implementation would be greatly appreciated. All of the hair looks like this girl has never seen a brush before, that also bothers me a lot. Hair is definitely VERY WIP
And as I mentioned earlier, I have some quick color flats on her, so I wouldn't mind getting your opinions about the basic color palette I'm planning to use as well.
Thanks in advance for any feedback ^-^
keep it up!
@Mtg_kirin - Yeah, I really wanted her to look fantasical, a magical being. I want her to be beautiful (See update below)I ultimately plan on her being covered in glitter ^0^
Here is an update, I've come up with some hair I am much happier with.
This hair looks much cleaner, and not nearly as wild, what do you think?
High Poly sculpt update tomorrow.
read it and make awesome art
And this is just a question going out to anyone with UnrealEd 3 knowledge.
I'm also trying to find a solution to my transparency problem. Apparently Unreal 3 can't have a lit material with a translucent blendmode, which is required from what I can tell for 8-bit alphas to work. This seems totally wrong and doesn't even make any sense, however the results are corruption and serious zsorting issues when I set a phong lighting solution on a translucent material. So unless I can find a work around for this, I will have to render it unlit which means no spec and no normal or rely on a crappy 1bit alpha mask... I'm not sure what the solution is for this problem, hopefully I can find it soon. Any ideas would be great!
I'm been playing in the mud, and here is the first pass. This is still one level shy of the really fine details, I'll be moving onto those tomorrow. I wanted to make a first pass to lay down the shapes and get a good feel for it. This is also my first Mudbox model I've done (Although I have a little bit of previous experience with zbrush) so any overall high poly modeling suggestions would be particularly appreciated. Also if there are any specific areas you would like to see a close up of, please feel free to ask.
I've been busy with other things as well, here is an update for her hair. Taking some suggestions I've gone and played with it a little.
And I've also made an adjustment to her color palette since I was getting some feedback that she was a bit too 'dark'.
So as usual, any feedback, suggestions, or whatever that you can think of, please let me know. Thanks again for viewing!
You could make your Hair with Mudbox too to give them a more cartoony style.
I think you need to make more folds/creases at the lower end of your clothes and less on the whole.
Her face looks a bit creepy in mudbox try to make it more like the concept, less is more here.
It's also very different from your concept, so try to make it more plain, it needs to be soft so i think you can also zbrush it less, also the chin seems too much detailed and have a more spear-like form compared to the concept.
Hope it helps
@ mtg_kirin - I was just thinking about the colors earlier. it's funny how subjective it is. Through all of the boards I've posted this on, I get very different answers and feedback for the colors in particular.
@ eclipse - Your suggestions actually helped a lot. I went back and studied the face a bit, and now realize what the problem was, her chin was a little weird, and her forehead was WAY too big. I made some quick corrections (See Below) So let me know what you think.
Ok, here are updates for the face. Man do I love mudbox, I can correct the base geometry in max, then import the changes as a layer in mudbox. Quick and painless. It's a sweet piece of software, I'm definitely digg'n it more then zbrush. Tell me what you think of new face, should be closer to the ref.
HighPoly GEO update (Smoothed everything out to cut down on the crazy folds) and a suggestion to flip the color palette, what do you think?
It will be time to start on the texture soon! excitement ^-^
i think the nose in the mudbox version is too realistic compared to the base mesh and to the concept, it's too present on the face, but if you like it i think i could fit too
If you want to reach that wonderful cartoon style you used on your concepts i think she need a smaller and simpler nose, actually you can do it just like a bumpy thing like the ones in Blue Dragon http://www.hwupgrade.it/immagini/bluedragon2_241106.jpg or go for a middle way (it can result too minimal too)
can't wait to see that piece textured
Currently though it's a decent middle ground between the original design and something more realistic.
I liked the blue on red better for your temp colors, but the blue on purple might be better if you reduced the saturation a touch on the purple.. seems a bit overpowering (more so on the purple on blue)
otherwise, I think it's pretty bitchin'
Looking good!
@ sir-knight - I was struggling with the colors a alot, however while working on the textures, I had a bit of an inspiration and went a completely different route. I think this is the cheerful bright character she is meant to be.
@ apocalypse - I did some character simplification, curtain rod (and long hair) are gone. Now the hat and the scarf are the only long floppy things to deal with back there.
UPDATES
I got distracted by an art test, but I'm back on track now. I also decided not to do as many forum updates. I was spending a decent amount of time just typing those up every night, so I figured a better use of my time would be to post a little less often and rely on my own judgment a bit more.
Here is an update for the diffuse. I did a complete re-unwrap after I changed the topology to spread out the texture space a little better. It was suggested by multiple people that I shoot for a Kingdom Hearts style for this piece and I happen to agree. I studied the KH models and scrutinized the textures a bit then went to town. All of these images are flat-shaded. I have some plans for an elaborate shader in UT3, but until I have that going, this should do fine. Crits are always welcome, I'll do a least another pass or two on this so I can clean up a few seams on the model, but anything that pops out or comes to mind, please let me know.
Edit - Oh yes, I almost forgot to mention, I made some design changes to the character. Mostly to simplify things a bit. What do you think?
High Quality version of the beauty shot image.
Thanks again for the support from everyone. I really want to finish up this project and move to the next.
In a real time environment I think a NM painted in the right style is a good idea though. Not that this character is going into unreal or anything ...
@ TWilson - Well ACTUALLY I was planning on putting this in Unreal the whole time
UPDATE
I still have some texture tweaking to do (I've done a little already) but I decided to take a quick break and set up my rotation system and shader in Unreal 3. Here is my shader WIP. It's actually almost where I want it to be, just a few tweaks here and there (just like the textures) so she's almost done. It uses two effects, one to give her some color around the edges of the model and a second to give her a glitter type effect. Unfortunately the glitter is pretty subtle and doesn't really show up from further away, so a close up view has also been included. The wire frames are in the video just to make sure I had that set up right in unreal, more a test of my own then a shader thing just fyi.
Dream Painter Shader Test AVI
Any and all feedback, as always is greatly appreciated!
Super cool character - stands out from all of the military/medieval characters we're used to seeing.