With something like this, you might save a TON of design time by painting out your scene first, especially if you're planning to only use a diffuse texture. Texturing on the fly like this forces you to think prop per prop inadvertently, instead of looking at the whole scene all the time.
@ SmilingMountain, SaboR1996 - Thank you! :) It has been awhile since an update! Here's just a little model I've been messing with. [SKETCHFAB]uw5FLs2EOAfUHTiFpjlN0828Ojb[/SKETCHFAB] Floating Crystals - 92 Tris - 512x512 Diffuse Currently doing some figure drawings too, which I'll probably post soon.
Yeah I think the most important thing is to get some colour into everything in your diffuse, even if its just really subtle. Otherwise this looks like a black and white image with a head a glow. For the solid armour, consider a colour overlay that compliments the blue glow. But otherwise nice work!
Could you give some simple renders, just the normals (no diffuse), no white outlines. Just simple black wireframe on a clay render? I think I see a few really simple ways to save a lot of polygons, but I can't quite focus with the complex rendering style and the triangulation.
I've used a white polypaint diffuse bake to help with an alpha before, though the object was harder than hair. You'll probably want better sampling, and depending on the result you may need some light photoshop work (I'm not sure what the correct term would be, 'feather' maybe?).
You can't simple subtract the images, diffuse is 2*X and Specular is X-Y. Also they are stored on the camera in sRGB so you must first make the conversion to Linear space. Its best to do these in shader code. For Gloss just solve for G using the BRDF shader code.
Great stuff guys. r_fletch_r -Just out of curiosity what map did you use in the filter slot of the self-illumination color to get that strong blue-white gradient. I tried using a white color for the diffuse and blue for the SI color but they blur into each other too much.
Tekoppar Good to hear that this stuff is understandable. Because this is what i try because it annoys me when stuff is explained too complicated especially when i try to read an article at wikipedia and only see numbers and formulars :D NEW #25 Dead Space 3 - Diffuse Reflections
Another thing I noticed was the OP didn't follow the concept art palette for making the diffuse map and character. Here is some examples where the people who model the characters from concept art based everything off it down to their original palette with some extra details just added
Final Update: Just thought I should update these threads now that I'm finishing up the folio. I used a normal map filter on the diffuse, and there's a later version on the model, I haven't updated the texture sheet just yet. View the quicktime turn arounds here: turn arounds