I'd like to think early Ubisoft 3d influence for this instead of Blizzard (Rayman 2 and Tonic Trouble are the earliest games I can think of to have this low poly diffuse handpainted style)
Wow, awesome!.! I like how clean and sharp the texturing is, man you nailed bounce lights, reflection and most of all expression in the diffuse. Very very impressive and inspiring, thanks for the share!
Would help to show what you've got so far. Pretty simple really... use self-illuminated materials with black diffuse, and scanline renderer, and disable both antialiasing and filter maps.
Found some time to work on the face diffuse. Excuse the wispy flyaways. The ears need some veinage but I might leave that for the subsurface since I'll be adding in the face veins in that way also.
I'm rendering it in Blender at the moment, but everything will be in Unity. Added some more variation to the colors on the diffuse and some of the specular values, and also darkened and roughed-up the spec. TRIED to make it rougher, at least.
This looks great! But how do you decimate a high-poly mesh while still retaining textures to be rendered in Mental Ray? Didn't you have to create UV's and a diffuse map for that first?
Looking good, I'll definitely keep an eye on this! The metal bits look too bright to me at the moment. They would probably be fairly dark in the diffuse. I also think the mustache should be thicker.
@Fabi_G are you going the hand-painted diffuse only route or do you plan on doing PBR? Just curious so I can give you better direction on material definition
Really cool and great subject matter. Not many crits, maybe punch up the AO in the diffuse texture to give it some more depth and pop. Also the material on the tires doesn't read as rubber.
When you are painting with the overlay and grayscale textures, can you also paint adding another layer and with its own diffuse, so that layer will not be overlaying on top of the color map, it will just blend with it.