Help with hellhound
polycounter lvl 8
Ive been working on this guy for a couple days now and Ive hit a dead end. The goal here is ANGER! It should look like he is straining so hard that his skull is ripping out of his mouth. I think that Im close, but I just cant figure out what that last little missing thing is. Any help would be much appreciated.
High Poly
Low Poly
High Poly
Low Poly
Replies
also, some of the forms look a bit unballanced. he's quite front-heavy. the front shoulder is a little big.. and it's a bit too lumpy. maybe you dont care amuch about detail, and i respect that, but at least ONE level of detail needs to be perfect. if you're not going to have detail, then the larger shapes have got to be bang on. pick what shapes you like, nail them perfectly, get him in a nice pose, and then decide later if you want to go in and add definition...
The lips! I cant really find much in the way of references for lips in the position I would like, but that doesnt mean I can just leave them out. So, I have made the lips more prominent and defined the creases around them a little more clearly. Im concerned that it looks more like the skin around the mouth is slipping off rather than violently ripping, but at least I think there is now some sense that the skull and the face are detaching.
For detail, I really would like to add more but my poor laptop is slowing down to 1 or 2 fps at half a million polys, another subdivision might start a fire. Once I have the current version perfect I might try bringing it into Zbrush to finish off the small details.
i don't see anything on your model resembling muscles. the random bulges you have on there make it look more like stone smoothed by running water.
You also seem to have him snarling so much he no longer has a nose.
http://images.google.com/images?ndsp=21&um=1&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&q=snarling+dog&start=0&sa=N
As for making him look more evil. First off his eyes are closed it looks like. That is not intimidating at all. His eyes are much too open.. or not open enough. Either make it look like he's gonna devour your heart or make him have this evil grin. Half-open like that makes it look like he's out of breath but not trying to show it.
I wish I could find the original picture, but Im not sure if it ever even existed. I think that the inspiration for this was an old (70s early 80s?) horror movie poster that I may or may not have seen as a kid. There was a wolf/dog jumping through the air to bite something with its skull stretched so far forward that it was coming out of its skin. Its been so many years that Im not even sure if I ever really saw such a poster or that it ever existed, but the idea is still lodged firmly in my mind...sort of, instead of a wolf in sheeps clothing a demon in wolfs clothing...the idea is that there is something even more terrifying hiding inside of the wolf and starting to break out of its skin. That (and lack of skill) was my motivation for the strange muscle shapes, but I do like the newer version as well since it draws more attention to the face.
Im still very concerned about he area over the nose and below the eye holes. Getting the skin to look like its peeling away from the bone unevenly is also giving me a hard time.