Sci-Fi soldier for Crysis mod :)

[Snefer]

Here's a character I'm working on for a crysis mod, and as an update to my portfolio. Its around 19 k triangles here, but will be reduced to 17k, it's got 2*2048 + one 1024 textures. :) Im focusing on getting the texture right for the torso before I move on to the legs. Still got alot of rough edges on the texturing and normalmap to fix. Still haven't started the specmap either :) You have to excuse the wonderful posing ^^

http://www.ringbrynja.com/3d/baine6.jpg
http://www.ringbrynja.com/3d/baine6b.jpg
http://www.ringbrynja.com/3d/baine6c.jpg
cheers! / Tor

[Kevin Johnstone]

Sexy !

Love the colour scheme too.

[Mark Dygert]

I love it too! Damn, that's some awesome high poly modeling.

Crits:
- The normal map on the face looks kind of fubar in some parts, around the ears, eyes and nose.
- The head/hair is obviously mirrored. It's not anything big, but you might want to disguise the seam (in the hair) a little better, or un-mirror the head.
- The fleshy part of the face/inner mouth is floating away from the teeth. Which gives characters a look like they are pressing their face against a sheet of glass and blowing. If this character was to talk, that is very distracting.
- The plates on the fingers are a little unpractical. I'm not sure the character could make a fist. Depending on how you structured the loops you might want to give the plates (on the knuckle side) some definition with loops so whoever rigs it up can control stretching and try to retain the hard edges.

[heribertovalle]

Woah. This is some SERIOUS modelling. Love the suit! The guy reminds me of the default dude from Mass Effect. Except... Cooler!

[Snefer]

I love it too! Damn, that's some awesome high poly modeling.

Crits:
- The normal map on the face looks kind of fubar in some parts, around the ears, eyes and nose.
- The head/hair is obviously mirrored. It's not anything big, but you might want to disguise the seam (in the hair) a little better, or un-mirror the head.
- The fleshy part of the face/inner mouth is floating away from the teeth. Which gives characters a look like they are pressing their face against a sheet of glass and blowing. If this character was to talk, that is very distracting.
- The plates on the fingers are a little unpractical. I'm not sure the character could make a fist. Depending on how you structured the loops you might want to give the plates (on the knuckle side) some definition with loops so whoever rigs it up can control stretching and try to retain the hard edges.

Thanks alot for the comments :)

also - warning for overusage of smileys ^^

Yeah, the face looks kinda funky, its mostly because of the render, I render it in lightwave, and lightwave have serious trouble with normalmaps and high angles like the side of the nose and the tip of the ears, etc. :) Yeah, the face-texture is mirrored right now, the face itself is not mirrored, but the texture is right now, still laying out the basics, but I mirrored the back of the head/hair to save space, but I'll try to disguise the seams as good as I can :) As for the mouth, yeah, I see what you mean, you mean his lips are a bit too far out, so that they dont connect to the teeth on the inside? I should probably fix that, thanks :) As for the fingers, I put the loop for bending the fingers between the plates so that I shouldnt have that problem :) ( I hope :P)
Thanks for the crits :)

[Jesse Moody]

holy FRACK!!!! Not what I expected at all. This is some seriously awesome shit.

[Jonathan]

Hey Snefer, tell the team I said hey, and I can't wait to see the end result of Eclipse.

Tell Dark he's doing a great job, as well as you and the rest of the team. :D

[LEViATHAN]

Ear looks a bit iffy, other than that it's great.

[Kawe]

hey. you can't call this thread "sci-fi character..." cause people will set their expectation meters low.. now you just broke mine. damn you! these things are expensive.

My only comment aside from the face that Vig mentioned is that the spine looks... weird. For some reason it doesn't seem to be a part of the suit cause it is popping out way too much... as if it isn't fitting inside the suit as well as not following the curvature of the body/suit. Probably cause of the dead on angle I guess.. hard to know what it really looks like.

EDIT: What I'm trying to say is.. imagine making a human character and pulling out the spine and putting it on top of the back. It looks weird.

[Jonathan]

The spine is like that in the Starcraft 2 trailer just released, so it's feasible, IMHO. :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELhtXtnV3pg

[Snefer]

here's a minor update, I fixed the mouth a bit, pulled down the eyes, and redid some stuff in the normalmap, hopefully a bit better now atleast. and started texturing the crotch-area :)

About the spine, maybe thats because they are loose polygons while everything else is in one piece...I'll have a look at it...

http://www.ringbrynja.com/3d/baine7.jpg

[Kawe]

Is that uhm.. thing by his nose intentional? It doesn't look like he's happy about it.

http://c.imagehost.org/0180/Untitled-1.jpg

[katzeimsack]

looks good, but WTF?
"17k, it's got 2*2048 + one 1024 textures" that's just crap ... one 2k is enough.
imho no game out there or even announced has specs near that (except fighting games where you only have two chars)

[MoP]

Looks pretty cool. The armour is very nicely detailed and believable ... the face looks a bit generic and not very interesting though. It seems like you are more confident making mechanical things than organic human stuff?

Also I agree with katzeimsack, 17,000 triangles for this character seems quite insane, can we see wireframes? I'd be interested to see where it's being spent. I'm fairly confident it could look just as good with under 10,000 triangles, since the normalmap is doing most of the detail work, all you have to worry about is large-scale silhouette, and extra polys for good deformation in anims. I have a feeling you're using lots of polys on stuff which the normalmap is quite capable of representing.

The texture count/size seems oddly high too, that's massive amounts of texture memory for just one character, could we see the flat textures? Again I reckon you could get away with half that texture budget and the character would look exactly the same unless you zoomed right in on his finger or something...

Either way, it's good work, I just think it could be more optimised :)

[Art1977]

Can post some wires please?

[The_Kozmonaut]

looks good, but WTF?
"17k, it's got 2*2048 + one 1024 textures" that's just crap ... one 2k is enough.
imho no game out there or even announced has specs near that (except fighting games where you only have two chars)

I am pretty sure that the main characters in Drakes Fortune on the PS3 are that high.

edit: yea I found the post from zbrushcentral http://www.pixolator.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=54100

his quote
" the main characters range from about 22k to 30k poly's. They do have a bunch of textures on them.. not sure really the total amount.. i haven't counted"

But I get what you are saying and most games still don't go anywhere near that. Just wanted to point out there are games out there that do.

[RazorBladder]

22-30k for drakes fortune models? Wow, that makes them even less impressive.
I tend to agree that this model could do with a lot of opimisation and you wouldn't notice a thing, shouldn't need anything more than a 2048 also.

[MoP]

Sure, for closeups and cinematics then you might wanna go that high (although 30k still sounds a bit insane!), I bet the vast majority of the time in the game when you're running around in third-person, it's a much lower LOD level.
They did the same with TF2, 10k+ for the "cinematic LOD", then about half that or lower for the actual in-game, running around characters.

So in this case it's probably a good idea to build this as the "cinematic LOD" intended for closeups and cutscenes, and then reduce it to about half the polys.

[Snefer]

Yeah, this character is gonna be used for both closeups and cinematics, that is why the polycount and texturesize is that high. Otherwise I would have gone with a bit less. UT3 have 2*2048*2048 textures for the characters, right? The GoW model for marcus fenix is around 15 k if I recall correctly? So if this was the main character for a game in the works with release in a year or so, would it be that insane?

And sure, maybe it doesnt need 2 textures, but then ofcourse you get half the resolution. I dont feel like I dont use the resolution, but yes it is high. I wanted to do a character with high specs for once, so, there you have it :) As for optimisation, yeah, I'm removing polygons, the final polycount will depend on how much of the depth and sillouette I want to sacrifice. I will post wires in a bit :)

And the thing on the nose is just the renderer treating me bad :( It's got a problem with high angles and normalmaps, I'm afraid.

[katzeimsack]

a normal char in gow has 8k tris and one 2k.. (even though on xbox 360 the textures look like they were downsized to one 1k)

even games in 3 years won't have that high resolutions for textures, the xbox 360 and ps3 don't have enough texture memory.

my domiance war entry had one 2k and i was able to paint skin pores in the texture.. so as long as you don't try to give every skin pore 20 pixels one 2k is fine.


for cinematics that's ok most of the time. MGS4 for example had extra cinematics models that were only shown in !small rooms! in cinematics (so that there was enough texture menomry and power to render them)...

the ingame models were way less detailed.



what i want to say is:
fine for cinematics.. but make a lowres version for the game (10k tris, one 2k texture)

[TheSplash]

His two 2048 textures and one 1024 are perfectly fine, I don't think they are over spec for a main character for a PC game. I've snooped around in the PC version of Devil May Cry 4 and the main character Nero's diffuse maps have about the same total pixels as Snefer's soldier (actually a bit more). Also it never hurts to make things higher res than you actually need, unless you are doing low spec stuff.

[PolyHertz]

mop: If I remember correctly Diamant said during his GDC presentation that Drakes Fortune didn't use LOD models at all.

[katzeimsack]

I am pretty sure that the main characters in Drakes Fortune on the PS3 are that high.

edit: yea I found the post from zbrushcentral http://www.pixolator.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=54100

his quote
" the main characters range from about 22k to 30k poly's. They do have a bunch of textures on them.. not sure really the total amount.. i haven't counted"

But I get what you are saying and most games still don't go anywhere near that. Just wanted to point out there are games out there that do.

http://www.ps3informer.com/playstation-3/images/uncharted-tb.jpg
http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/image/article/789/789108/uncharted-drakes-fortune-20070516073337616.jpg

those two shots show, that the drake model looks like it's about 10k and has one 2k texture ..
I'm shure it's not only looking liek that..


His two 2048 textures and one 1024 are perfectly fine, I don't think they are over spec for a main character for a PC game. I've snooped around in the PC version of Devil May Cry 4 and the main character Nero's diffuse maps have about the same total pixels as Snefer's soldier (actually a bit more). Also it never hurts to make things higher res than you actually need, unless you are doing low spec stuff.

I guess it's the same thing tf2 and mgs4 do .. lod 0 and mipmap 0 are only shown in cinematics, lod 1 and mipmap 1 (about 10k and 2k texture) are for the ingame versions...

But it would even be ok (not good, but ok) for devil may cry. It's a 3rd person game, you always see your character.All the other characters are deffinately lower..


mop: If I remember correctly Diamant said during his GDC presentation that Drakes Fortune didn't use LOD models at all.

Marketing :D
they probebly had a lod algorithm and no models :D

[Xaltar]

I would just keep this as a cinimatic/closeup lod. Optimise it and then make new UVs on a different channel and bake the lot down to 1 x 2048. Shouldn't loose much detail.

[Snefer]

Texturing and optimization goes on... I'll post a pic of the back of the highpoly in the meantime. The head there is just a dummy, also. :)

As for texturesize and polycount, I will keep the polycount as low as possible without losing shapes, and maybe I'll bake the texture down, I'll see what works best. I'll probably do a test anyway. I'm thinking of redoing the head, not sure yet, see if I can save it. He looks very generic, and on top of that a bit wierd ^^

http://www.ringbrynja.com/3d/woop22.jpg

[MoP]

Really nice shapes and detailing. I like it!

[timwiese]

love the high poly detailing, nice work. everything flows together really well.

[imb3nt]

awesome work.:poly142:

[stimpack]

When I first looked at your textured version, I thought that it was a heavy set of gear. Now looking at the Highpoly, it seems to have a "light gear" feel. I think its all the really small details that make it feel flimsy. In the textured version, the colors and such blured out all that detail so it came across as a big solid piece of armor. Not sure what look your going for, but you can go either way it seems at this point. Also the rings on the fingers are really generic. You have alot of interesting shapes and details going on, lets see some of that influece in the fingers as well.

Where are his legs?

[Snefer]

thanks for the comments :) As for the feel of his gear, I want it to be a medium-heavy combat armorsuit, so he can still have regular movement, but not so light that it looks "vulnerable". I want to avoid the über-heavy clumsy space-marine in favor for a more commando-style guy. The legs will be posted in a day or so, I not satisfied with them, and I'm laying out basic textures there still. :) but soon.

[CataFa]

Really nice work on the high poly model. Like others said before, the specs you're going for a quite high. It of course depends from what you wanna with this character but I still think you can probably get it down in polys and texture without loosing much.

[Snefer]

and here comes the unveiling of his legs! :-P This pic is from when the normalmap was fresh out of
the oven, still steaming hot and all that ^^ Got some errors in it and whatnot, was before I got
around to fixing the errors, I was mostly just happy to have the bastard mapped and ready :)

excuse huge image-size ^^
http://www.ringbrynja.com/3d/rendered.jpg

[whats_true]

The modeling on the feet seem a little weak compared to the rest of the body. Other then that, pretty cool dude.

[Slaught]

I agree with whats_true.
Also I think the legs look a bit bulky compared to his torso.

The head looks good but a bit generic and is missing character in my opinion.
Sometimes when modelling a head I throw together a few headshots of actors that could play the role of the character in a movie and try to mixmatch some of their most characteristic traits.
Wrinkles, the way the eyes look, special forms of the face etc...

If you´re going for the military look with the hair, keep in mind that there are more than one hairstyles in the army.
Maybe make his hair a bit longer on the top with the sides short.
Or maybe a buzzcut with a high hairline, Bruce Willis style.

Keep going man it´s looking great. :D

[Talbot]

This is amazing! Keep it up!

[Art1977]

^Please can you post some wireshots of this ?

Just some Screenshots of the Workspace no render..

[WipEout]

Awesome details, but the foot shape is blobby and cartoony. Plus, it doesn't look like he can fold the foot at the metatarsals for walking. With the seemingly metal look of his boots it would seem like he walks in solid casts with no flexibility. Slip in some jointed pieces around the foot and give it a better silhouette and he'll be golden!

[Snefer]

here's an update on the texture. Lower part of the legs is still pretty much random, haven't got around to that part yet. But the thoighs is pretty much done in the basic texturing I think, justn eed to detail them and add scratches etc. :)

aaand..the start of a new head, that needs crits badly :D


http://www.ringbrynja.com/3d/baine9.jpg
http://www.ringbrynja.com/3d/newface4.jpg

[Ged]

I think your head sculpt has strange lips, they dont seem to connect properly with the muscle structure of the face. The nose could also be a little narrower, its almost as wide as his mouth at the moment. Its up to you :P

nice low poly texturing.

[Snefer]

yeah, the lips are a bit problematic, I have a hard time with those. Have changed around some o the features here, hopefully for the better.


http://www.ringbrynja.com/3d/newface6.jpg

[Mr GetDown]

The heads better. Good job

You wanna work on the flow between the two lips. The line where the lips join needs to be more shaply. I also think that in the profile view the top lip looks overly round. And that the top of the top lip should be sharper and jut out more.
You probably wanna look at the outta ear nearing the back of the head. It's hard to describe - the outlining flesh of the ear normally curls in, but in your image, it is smoothed out at this point, much more like collar flour ear.

These are just some minor things. You did a good job over all.


p.s
Also look at neck muscles
There was nothing wrong with the nose!! Now though the end looks too pointy!