building a playable character is mandatory for entry, the other stuff (additional elements) is optional but recommended.
Cool, Thanks for the info. I'll try to put a cool background together. I've drawn up orthos for the body, gona work it up tonight after I get home from college.
Here's another quick question. Would multiple costumes count towards the same entry? At the moment I'm going with the costume from the film poster but I'm not sure if I'd prefer one of the other ones. (I'm not trying to spam with entries, I'd prefer it to count as one)
The other entries are looking amazing. I'm very jealous of the val kilmer model. The bride, agent 99 and indie are coming along awesome too. JohnnySix my initial reaction was buddah but his lack of appearence in action films makes me think I may be wrong...
The thing about using that photo is that the light is from underneath. Shading with the light above seems more practical/versatile unless the game were to have floor-lighting everywhere.
Eric-
She probably looks so weird from the side due to the plane the eyes are mapped on being flat, what if you cut the planes in half and bent the outer edges back? would help, I think.
I will try this!
I was wondering if hands like this guy's chars' are a good solution -> http://www.tomtallian.com/
The fingers are just plans and they seem to work well!
Need to cut tris somewhere!
700 tris seems to be a lot at first but I'm running out budget very quickly for sure
what does 4x 128*128 texture means? it's separate albedo, diffuse, spec and normal? or alpha instead of normal? hmm but hand held wouldn't have normal I suppose.. maybe no spec too?
and 1x 256*256px it's only mean one color texture?
Wow, never knew spacey's real name but yeah, those hands are hot...
but to psychotron, you can have 4 128x maps (1 for head, 1 for body, etc.) or have one texture 256x, which is the same size as 4 128 maps. alpha and spec maps are also allowed as the same size as your diffuse maps, their just not counted.
I think...
and Convoy, that looks much better, but I second the skinnier legs deal, keep it up
I think I might do a second character before I polish Marv, who though?
Made the body today. total tricount is 596 I think. That leaves enough for the dress and the hair I'd say. I hate the hands, might try out those plane fingers like tom tallian's models.
It's weird, I cant see my posts yet I got a reply though... I'm new so I'm not sure if you just don't see your posts or if it's because I'm still having to have my comments approved.
I was wondering if hands like this guy's chars' are a good solution -> http://www.tomtallian.com/
The fingers are just plans and they seem to work well!
I'm thinking about it like this: would the game require them to have fingers? Well, if it's a beat 'em up, they're going to be doing a a lot of punching/throwing, and you might be able to just get by with modeling fists. Or the art director might specifically want hands for animation purposes. It depends where you want to spend your budget to put detail. I chose to put a little more in the face of my character, but I might go back and optimize portions of it to give me enough to go in and add either one hand, or a fist with a trigger finger (if one of the props is a gun).
Can I ask, how many tris you used for just one hand?
@Shrew81: If you wanted to stick with Sin City, maybe dwight or harrigan? Miho or Nancy could be fun too.
I think I might do a second character before I polish Marv, who though?
Perhaps (forgive me for not having read the comic) The Man (Josh Hartnett) would give a nice contrast to Marv? A slick and more delicate killer to counter Marv's brute force.
Can I ask, how many tris you used for just one hand?
They were 59 tris each! And they didn't even look good.
I'll stay with plane fingers for now (28 triangles/hand) to help with weapon animation. This let me add more details to the face, which I'm still working on.
But thanks to your comment I took the time to watch videos from this kind of games, and yes, it's all about fists.
As you can see I chose an "awesome" angle to show my new hand...
Re-worked the legs entirely. This totally screams April O'Neil to me. Going to make her an alpha map to get the decals that are on her suit on. Still not very happy with the hair. Going to start working on scenery and destructible(s) tomorrow.
@Convoy_Avenger. The suit needs to be a brighter shade of yellow. its far too orange. Also the hair looks a bit green and is shorter than in the movie. In Gimp to fix it up just make a selection of the area you want to change and use colorize. She looks good besides. Perhaps a bit more contrast on the face to make her features pop and add a few more curves to her body. I love the katana and sheath
I'm liking the Marv and the Hathaway models. And I am looking forward to the Snake, V for Vendetta, Indy, and Leon models (damn you for stealing Leon!).
Beatrix Kiddo looks like she needs some tweaking. The pelvis and hips seem a bit off. Almost like the hind-quarters of a canine. I'll post a pic in a sec.
psychotron: (4) 128's = (1) 256. I think we get diffuse, alpa, spec maps for this. ericamilhomem: face looks great. not hard to imagine punchin' chumps in the fotch:D
not sure why this guy popped into my head, but here he is:
Finally gotten to the dreaded texture portion of the character. I threw on a photo for the face and the design on the tank top for now; and roughed in a basic color for the rest of it. Texturing's definitely not my strongest point, so I'm gonna be spending a lot of time over the next few days working on it.
I'm pretty happy with how it's coming along so far; I was able to squeeze in enough optimization to give me a trigger finger with 700 tris.
700 tris seems to be a lot at first but I'm running out budget very quickly for sure
what does 4x 128*128 texture means? it's separate albedo, diffuse, spec and normal? or alpha instead of normal? hmm but hand held wouldn't have normal I suppose.. maybe no spec too?
and 1x 256*256px it's only mean one color texture?
Here's my Jane Smith so far. It was about 720 tris at first but I managed to get some optimisations going on. I though I was well under but there you go. The problem with blender is you have to convert to tris to see how many you have so I hadn't done it in a while.
The shoulders and chest is terrible I know but I'm working on it. I'll prob get some texture detail down first though. (posted a )
Painting a rough texture as I model. It's a work flow I recently adopted, it feels more organic and controlled. I think I'll need to add more geo to this front part of the face if I have some tris left later; I wanna make those fists nice and chunky
Rorkimaru, you can use the decimate modifier to see the tri count.
Mikeala from Transformers.
I'd like to argue that her boobs are her weapon, so I can model her a loose shirt-- as I am at 702 Tris.
I still have to texture her hair, boots, arms, legs.
here's little progress with Leon, rough sketch of body, trying to be anatomicaly correct but he don't be naked so that 'correctness' goes away with his trausers I hope
what causing me problems are lowpoly joints.. they don't deform very well hmm
anyway thanks for answers about textures so I stick with 256*256 then
genericnamedave: thanks but go ahead and work on your Leon too or it isn't allowed?
fearian: thanks I hope I manage it to the finish
okno: definitely, it can be final fight heh
No that's okay psychotron, I'll stick to mikeala.
If you'd like to get more poly mileage, maybe give Leon his trademark toque, and give him some decal shades. His trench coat, if closed, would also help you out. You could literally chop off his legs that way! Just my $0.02. Oh, and you have to model his plant too. Okay? Okay.
Character work is very tough trying to stick to the poly count. It forces you to be creative with the mesh however.
Hm I wanna give him white longsleeve, braces and trousers
but you can be sure I make his plant.. I think about it from start
if all things go well I try Mathilda as NPC too
Began texturing the face. It's just a photo baked on but I'm in the process of retouching it to make it not look like ass. A bit of painting over it as well to make features stand out a bit better
Hey Okno,
Just throwing my $0.02 out there. A quickie crit: Your Mr Oldman has a 'flattened' facial appearance, which is more apparent at certain angles. He would benefit from a more pronounced brow, the eyes more inset, and the temples more compressed. His eyes seem too far apart (the rule is one eye-length in between). The overall head could be 'thinned' (the ears closer together).
I like to use what I call a 'Batman cowl' (circa 1989 movie) approach to low-poly modeling. Batman had a pointy mask in the brow, temple, and nose, as well as prominent cheek bones. It works because it covers all the facial features using triangle shapes.
Without sounding too long-winded, I grabbed a few pics of Oldman, and mapped out the face using this technique. It not only fits his facial structure, but also helps give a decent silhouette from any angle. Looks like he lost some hair and gained some weight between the right and left pics, so it is not exact.
Obviously it's not perfect, but your textures would do the rest of the heavy lifting. If you have extra Tris to spare, you can add more geometry to the lips and/or eyes.
I want to ask if shading of mesh is important too or can be 'ignored' in name of lower polycount.. simple: does that low hardware spec do all that fancy diffuse and specular shading.. and support normal maping (if yes it's normalmap worth even in 256*256)?
I would say you want your mesh to smooth as best as possible(smooth groups and whatnot). Normal maps not important/necessary, I think. Using the Gimli created for this challenge - the Self Illumination is set 60%, so lighting doesn't affect it much - which doesn't confuse the light sourcing as painted in. Hope this makes sense:D
I want to ask if shading of mesh is important too or can be 'ignored' in name of lower polycount.. simple: does that low hardware spec do all that fancy diffuse and specular shading.. and support normal maping (if yes it's normalmap worth even in 256*256)?
shading style up to you.
no normal maps, only diffuse / spec / transparent.
Here is the lovely Mrs smith. The arms are a bit crappy and I'm not too happy with the texture. But the variety of other things, mostly college related I have on my plate means I cant be too picky. 698 tris, 256*256 png diffuse map with 1bit alpha included in the file. I'll get around to riging and cleaning up the texture when I get a bit more free time. Thank god we have until the end of sept or this would probably by my (disqualified) entry image!
she looks nice! looks like you used the one reference image that everybody uses when modeling her, so her forehead is too big. other than that I think your doing good! (the boobs are also slightly too capped off ont he bottom in side profile). Looking forward to the texture!
I don't do much low-poly or character work in 3d so I figure I'll give this challenge a shot. Should be good practice and fun! Gonna go with one of my favorites:
she looks nice! looks like you used the one reference image that everybody uses when modeling her, so her forehead is too big. other than that I think your doing good! (the boobs are also slightly too capped off ont he bottom in side profile). Looking forward to the texture!
Yeah I took a look at her face when I was finished making the spin around and noticed how scrunched up she is. I've fixed it a bit now. The boobs do still bug me, the are rather strange looking and a bit too big. I'm sure I'll figure a way to fix her. Perhaps I'll use my two remaining triangles...
here is a turnaround, textured her hair now, and arched her back (a more confident pose!), and did some more body work. I am trying some transparency with the hands too, so they look out of wack at the moment.
I shall park her for awhile til this challenge is nearly over! I also have a low-poly Bumblebee she can use as her 'weapon'.
Hey Rorkimaru! You picked a cool character to model.
If you find some time between college work, here's some things that I would look into tweaking on your model. Hopefully it helps!
Wow! Thanks for the tips. Its always great to have a second pair of eyes look at a model. Those tips will make the model look so much better. The photomanip makes it look like something I could be really proud of.
Thank you so much for going out of your way to help me that much! I'm going to keep this picture on file to make sure I never make those mistakes again!
this is my 1st real low poly character. so hopefully I will be able to finish him. still alot of tweaking to do (especially to the face) and adding hands. Any crits would be appreciated. especially on the joint topology
o also is i am legend actiony enough? or is it to much thriller/horror?
Filling out the detail, not sure whether to go with the costume from the first film. The collar is giving me headaches.
I could only recommend making the collar a 'floating' unattached piece to save tris, with something in the front that ties it up. Make it render two-sided as well. Delete any covered neck tris too.
I also see some people who might be preserving tris on the head covered by hair...those can by deep-sixed. My Mikeala is pretty much a mask framed by hair.
Hello, I saw this challenge and decided that it was so fun that I needed to create an account and join(I'm not much into joining new things even those damn discount cards at stores). Anyhoo I'm going to create Rick O'Connell from The Mummy.
Thanks for the advice, genericnamedave. I was modelling the face in ortho view which was a big mistake since the photo refs are obviously all shot with perspective cameras, hah. I've tried to give him more geometric definition as you said. I still can't get his likeness, I think I need to work on the texture alot more, but first I wanna rough in the body.
@Mtg_kirin, for the knee and elbow joints, I have found them to collapse badly the way you have them now. I prefer to put the extra edges on the opposite side; they may be pointy when they bend but they retain their volume. I could be wrong though
Replies
Cool, Thanks for the info. I'll try to put a cool background together. I've drawn up orthos for the body, gona work it up tonight after I get home from college.
Here's another quick question. Would multiple costumes count towards the same entry? At the moment I'm going with the costume from the film poster but I'm not sure if I'd prefer one of the other ones. (I'm not trying to spam with entries, I'd prefer it to count as one)
The other entries are looking amazing. I'm very jealous of the val kilmer model. The bride, agent 99 and indie are coming along awesome too. JohnnySix my initial reaction was buddah but his lack of appearence in action films makes me think I may be wrong...
I will try this!
I was wondering if hands like this guy's chars' are a good solution -> http://www.tomtallian.com/
The fingers are just plans and they seem to work well!
Need to cut tris somewhere!
Looks much better now that you fixed this!
700 tris seems to be a lot at first but I'm running out budget very quickly for sure
what does 4x 128*128 texture means? it's separate albedo, diffuse, spec and normal? or alpha instead of normal? hmm but hand held wouldn't have normal I suppose.. maybe no spec too?
and 1x 256*256px it's only mean one color texture?
but to psychotron, you can have 4 128x maps (1 for head, 1 for body, etc.) or have one texture 256x, which is the same size as 4 128 maps. alpha and spec maps are also allowed as the same size as your diffuse maps, their just not counted.
I think...
and Convoy, that looks much better, but I second the skinnier legs deal, keep it up
I think I might do a second character before I polish Marv, who though?
It's weird, I cant see my posts yet I got a reply though... I'm new so I'm not sure if you just don't see your posts or if it's because I'm still having to have my comments approved.
anyway, here she is:
I'm thinking about it like this: would the game require them to have fingers? Well, if it's a beat 'em up, they're going to be doing a a lot of punching/throwing, and you might be able to just get by with modeling fists. Or the art director might specifically want hands for animation purposes. It depends where you want to spend your budget to put detail. I chose to put a little more in the face of my character, but I might go back and optimize portions of it to give me enough to go in and add either one hand, or a fist with a trigger finger (if one of the props is a gun).
Can I ask, how many tris you used for just one hand?
@Shrew81: If you wanted to stick with Sin City, maybe dwight or harrigan? Miho or Nancy could be fun too.
Perhaps (forgive me for not having read the comic) The Man (Josh Hartnett) would give a nice contrast to Marv? A slick and more delicate killer to counter Marv's brute force.
They were 59 tris each! And they didn't even look good.
I'll stay with plane fingers for now (28 triangles/hand) to help with weapon animation. This let me add more details to the face, which I'm still working on.
But thanks to your comment I took the time to watch videos from this kind of games, and yes, it's all about fists.
As you can see I chose an "awesome" angle to show my new hand...
Looks great! the new face is brilliant, Very dramatic eyes.
Re-worked the legs entirely. This totally screams April O'Neil to me. Going to make her an alpha map to get the decals that are on her suit on. Still not very happy with the hair. Going to start working on scenery and destructible(s) tomorrow.
Beatrix Kiddo looks like she needs some tweaking. The pelvis and hips seem a bit off. Almost like the hind-quarters of a canine. I'll post a pic in a sec.
The profile knee is probably a tad low.
ericamilhomem: face looks great. not hard to imagine punchin' chumps in the fotch:D
not sure why this guy popped into my head, but here he is:
I'm pretty happy with how it's coming along so far; I was able to squeeze in enough optimization to give me a trigger finger with 700 tris.
Thats spot on fantastic stuff!
@genericnamedave: Thanks for the tips! I'm making some adjustments now and will post some pics soon.
The shoulders and chest is terrible I know but I'm working on it. I'll prob get some texture detail down first though. (posted a )
Painting a rough texture as I model. It's a work flow I recently adopted, it feels more organic and controlled. I think I'll need to add more geo to this front part of the face if I have some tris left later; I wanna make those fists nice and chunky
Rorkimaru, you can use the decimate modifier to see the tri count.
I'd like to argue that her boobs are her weapon, so I can model her a loose shirt-- as I am at 702 Tris.
I still have to texture her hair, boots, arms, legs.
What I usually do is press Ctrl+T in edit mode to check and then just undo it with Ctrl+Z. Then it says it up at the top right Fa:XX for faces = XX.
what causing me problems are lowpoly joints.. they don't deform very well hmm
anyway thanks for answers about textures so I stick with 256*256 then
genericnamedave: thanks but go ahead and work on your Leon too or it isn't allowed?
fearian: thanks I hope I manage it to the finish
okno: definitely, it can be final fight heh
Joseph Pomeisl: wow what a work!
If you'd like to get more poly mileage, maybe give Leon his trademark toque, and give him some decal shades. His trench coat, if closed, would also help you out. You could literally chop off his legs that way! Just my $0.02. Oh, and you have to model his plant too. Okay? Okay.
Character work is very tough trying to stick to the poly count. It forces you to be creative with the mesh however.
but you can be sure I make his plant.. I think about it from start
if all things go well I try Mathilda as NPC too
anim for better sense of shape
Just throwing my $0.02 out there. A quickie crit: Your Mr Oldman has a 'flattened' facial appearance, which is more apparent at certain angles. He would benefit from a more pronounced brow, the eyes more inset, and the temples more compressed. His eyes seem too far apart (the rule is one eye-length in between). The overall head could be 'thinned' (the ears closer together).
I like to use what I call a 'Batman cowl' (circa 1989 movie) approach to low-poly modeling. Batman had a pointy mask in the brow, temple, and nose, as well as prominent cheek bones. It works because it covers all the facial features using triangle shapes.
Without sounding too long-winded, I grabbed a few pics of Oldman, and mapped out the face using this technique. It not only fits his facial structure, but also helps give a decent silhouette from any angle. Looks like he lost some hair and gained some weight between the right and left pics, so it is not exact.
Obviously it's not perfect, but your textures would do the rest of the heavy lifting. If you have extra Tris to spare, you can add more geometry to the lips and/or eyes.
I want to ask if shading of mesh is important too or can be 'ignored' in name of lower polycount.. simple: does that low hardware spec do all that fancy diffuse and specular shading.. and support normal maping (if yes it's normalmap worth even in 256*256)?
shading style up to you.
no normal maps, only diffuse / spec / transparent.
Yeah I took a look at her face when I was finished making the spin around and noticed how scrunched up she is. I've fixed it a bit now. The boobs do still bug me, the are rather strange looking and a bit too big. I'm sure I'll figure a way to fix her. Perhaps I'll use my two remaining triangles...
I decided to go with Cherry Darling from Planet Terror. She's 700 tris on the dot.
I shall park her for awhile til this challenge is nearly over! I also have a low-poly Bumblebee she can use as her 'weapon'.
If you find some time between college work, here's some things that I would look into tweaking on your model. Hopefully it helps!
Wow! Thanks for the tips. Its always great to have a second pair of eyes look at a model. Those tips will make the model look so much better. The photomanip makes it look like something I could be really proud of.
Thank you so much for going out of your way to help me that much! I'm going to keep this picture on file to make sure I never make those mistakes again!
Awesome! Can't wait to see it rigged and textured. Bonus points for incorporating the weapon in the the model haha
Full body :
o also is i am legend actiony enough? or is it to much thriller/horror?
I could only recommend making the collar a 'floating' unattached piece to save tris, with something in the front that ties it up. Make it render two-sided as well. Delete any covered neck tris too.
I also see some people who might be preserving tris on the head covered by hair...those can by deep-sixed. My Mikeala is pretty much a mask framed by hair.
@DemonPrincess, nice - can't wait to see texture
@Mtg_kirin, for the knee and elbow joints, I have found them to collapse badly the way you have them now. I prefer to put the extra edges on the opposite side; they may be pointy when they bend but they retain their volume. I could be wrong though