Joe W.I.P.

[pixelmitherer]

Hello,

I've just started working on a new character (starting with the head) for which I thought I'd post up my W.I.P. so far, and open it up for a few crits.



The head is 1294 tris, and has one 512*512 colour map and one 512*512 normal map. Lowpoly modelling in Maya with the maps created in Photoshop.








Here's the Highpoly sculpt version of the head that I generated the normal map from.






And a tarted up screen capture of the colour map and normal map together to get a overall feel for the character!...

[Japhir]

that is so awesome! great character!

[Robe]

i like that.. the 3/4 and front view, but the side .. the proportion are good, but that long curved line between the nose and nape...

[Kalango]

the texture dont seems to capture all the highpoly details, its a bit dull and stiff. the high poly gives him one sort of "old guY" feeling, but the texture shows that he's young....pretty cool character btw.

[BigJohn]

Very nice stuff. I like it a lot.

Any chance you could post the texture? I'd love to see it

[yoyomon]

Nice head. I can't really see the normal though. It looks all hand painted, which is looking great.

[pixelmitherer]

Hey,

thanks for all the comments.

I'm fairly new to characters (although I've been texturing for a few years now) so it's good to get some other views. Sometimes you can't see the 'wood for the trees'

Kalango: Yeah, you're right on the texture, it is lacking in some dynamic range at the moment (perhaps even a little monochromatic?!), need to mess with this and add more of the highpoly details in.

Robe: HA! yeah I did debate on whether to have a nose bridge or not. But in the end I went with my original hook nose design!

yoyoman: Yeah perhaps the normal is a little too subtle. I think I was just trying to avoid the 'extreme' normal map look.



BigJohn: Heres the 512*512 colour and normal map...

[Mike_K]

very good!

[nazeil]

I dig it!

If you didn't want to push your normal map to much further you could bake out a cavity map instead. and then apply that to your texture to help bring out the wrinkles.

[pixelmitherer]

Here's an update on my character, as usual all crits are welcome...



naziel: what software do you recommend for the cavity map? I've been working with 3Ds Max recently, and while I've succesfully rendered out a normal map i'm still having trouble with occlusion/cavity maps!!

[nazeil]

I find that zbrush does a decent cavity map. I'm a maya user, which does decent AO, but Faogen does even better.

[HntrLuc]

really cool work man

[poopinmymouth]

Really awesome work so far. Reminds me a bit of Pior's work.

Love the face.

[pixelmitherer]

Hello,

thanks all for the comments! :lucky:
This is not much of an update, but I managed to fix the face a little and do a little colour correction, and combine a cavity map with the texture.

nazeil: Thanks for recommending Faogen, I haven't tried this yet, but I will test it out.
In the end a friend suggested a free program called Xnormal which is a fantastic little bit of software and I was able to render out the Normal/A.O./Cavity maps that I needed, and also view them in its own 3D viewer! Sweet!

Recommended if you've never used it before.






Still needs some work, but it's getting closer to how I want it to look.

[Japhir]

very cool! the arm in the post before this is placed a bit too low, but i guess it was just a temporary one right?
keep it up! looking forward to updates!

(oh and everybody uses xnormal)

[pixelmitherer]

Oh Yeah, that arm is slightly low, thanks Japhir. I'll take another look at that.

HA! HA! I guess I was just the last person to hear about XNormal

[free-willy]

sweet texturing and nice style with the nose

[Kaneth]

I think this will be a top notch model when its complete.

[pixelmitherer]

Hello,

Thought it was about time I returned to this character, get something completed for once!

Decided to make it a little more asymetrical, remove one of the arms, and replace it with a mechanical one.







Also, did I quick paint over to decide on the design/colour scheme etc of the armour, not sure about it at the moment tho, seems to have gone a bit Halo-ish?!?








C&C would be appreciated.
Thanks.

[SuPa-]

It's great to see an update on this!
And I think the paint over design is pretty solid