@Xaltar, I switch between the two views, no idea why.. but i've been taking screenshots in ortho too :x so i'll do perspective ones instead now.
@Haiasi, Thanks man! Here's a new version, i've rounded out the shape of both the eye and the eyebrow and changed the bottom lip shape, hue and highlights a little, hopefully this is what you were thinking of.
I've reached the point where i'm not sure what else i need to add, again I guess i could just start texturing the hat, any more critiques on the face texture would be awesome!
I think what you need is an overall shading of the whole head(Yes, I know that this is the critique I keep falling back on ). The front of the head should be more conspicuous so you should use less saturation and brightness on the back of the head. Remember what I said with the ball and everything at the beginning of the thread? Same thing here.
I would simplify some of the textures of your face as well(look at Demonprincess' Paint-over). I think some of your values are too dark and inconsistent. Try and smooth them out a bit so they look like gradients more.
I did simplify the head texture down to a very smooth version like in Demonprincess' paint over, but it lost alot of its.. manlyness, (almost looked like a child), which is why i went and added some stubble and stuff to make it look a bit more rugged. Would be nice to see if anybody can come up with a work around for smooth gradients but still not look baby-faced, im not sure how i'd achieve that look :S.
I'm pretty sure i understand what you mean by the shading this time, having done it on the lava head, but i did a paint over just to double check that i havn't got the wrong idea before i go ahead and start changing stuff on the texture:
I think that's a bit too much. You could make the back slightly darker but not like a shadow. The main problem here with your texture is that many of the values simply get cut off. There should be a smoother transition. That's what I meant by looking at Demonprincess' Paint-over(don't mind the redesign, look at the technique!).
Also, I'm not sure how you've uv-mapped your model but if there are no overlapping face uv's then you could add a shadow under the straw of hair in his forehead.
I didn't unwrap it, it's MOP's SDK Yea it's not mirrored, so i can add shadow under the hair, was going to do that with a multiply layer once i get stuff looking good on both sides. i'll have a look at the values again, cheers.
Awesome progress on the last head! I'm a bit late to the party and you called this one done, but for future heads I think the beard stubble is a bit to gray blue-ish at the moment, it fails a bit like spray on paint in my opinion, I think using a more red-ish gray would make it feel more as a part of the face. (since his hair is a red/brown color too).
But really awesome job, you put a lot of effort into this one and it shows
Hey Meintevd, thanks alot! Looking at it now i think your right about the blue beard xD I'll probably fix that at some point..
Ok, i started having a crack at the god-like SDK which is MOP's goblin, i was pretty happy with this to start with and then i scrolled through the goblin thread and i suddenly felt very sub-par Either way, still pretty WIP, would love critiques before i start wrinkling him up n stuff
That tat on his forehead is meant to be glowing, i thought it would be interesting to have a secondary light source, but i'm having trouble selling it as 'glowing' right now. Any tips on that would be amazing too!
In my opinion, it looks like there is a light just above his head instead of the light source being from his head. I dont think there's a lot of refs of glowing skin but maybe if its mnore localised, a diffuse soft edged halo or something, kind of like its glowing into and through the skin thats closest.
Working on this at the moment, some scary looking shit right now, but hopefully i can make her look less crazy. Need some fresh eyes on the skin tones at the moment and general shading before i move up in detail. Crits?
I think your mesh is very problematic. I don't think you can get rid of the scariness with just the texture.
When a face is just not working out, your best bet is to go back to reality. You can't really pull off a good stylized face if you can't model a good realistic face. I suggest you get some good front and side view photos of a real person, and match up the mesh to that.
Jessica: yea the eyebrows were coming at a later date, i always stick them on after i get the forehead looking right for some reason, just find it easier, even if they are on a different layer! agreed with the dip, i took out an edgeloop from there aswell as it wasnt needed.
DemonPrincess: I know exactly what you mean by reality being a better study, and its something i really should do, but unfortunately this model falls under a school project to "create a stylised character"... even though we havnt been tasked to make a realistic one yet.. i think it was a tactic to make people stay inside of maya and not go sculpting crazy detail in zbrush yet... but it just ended up confusing half the class:/
I will definately start making a realistic face along side this as an extra study, but for now, im going to have to stick with this one... did a few mesh tweaks, added some stuff (stolen slipgates SDK hair technique/style)... think this is looking less scary now?
Ah, I see. Odd approach, you'd think it would be much better to start with modeling on top of either photos or model sheets for a first head. :poly111:
Anyways, the head has definitely improved a lot so far.
Even for a stylized head though, I would still use references, especially for stuff like ear and nose anatomy.
Im back! ditched the goblin due to hatred of my initial idea, found this one by bobo though which is so awesome i can't avoid doing it.
early WIP, same deal, crits crits crits pleaseeee
This is actually getting to a pretty nice stage. A quick levels adjustment to increase the contrast goes a very long way on this project.
In your levels adjustment, bring your left and right most arrows closer in towards your histogram to get a proper range of light in the texture, it looks a lot better.
@ Haiasi, thanks man, i will probably revisit him soon and give it some love! Cheers for the tip.
Here's another update based on the paint over, ear is still ugly
I'd check the nose again though, and what I did in the paint-over.
You'll still want to flesh out the underside of the nose, as it's looking very flat on your mesh. Also, where the upper lip transistions into the nose, you have it caving in really far, giving her a slightly duck-lipped appearance.
Don't introduce shadows and forms just for the sake of having them -- think about what every shadow says about the shape of the model. For example: Why is there a crevice in her face between her lower eyelid and the cheeks? Are the sides of her temple really exposed directly to the lightsource, or is that creating a confusing shape? Is the jaw rendered consistently with the other shapes on the face, or is it overly defined?
I can do a paintover if you really need, but use the eye as an example and think about it: What is the shape of the lower eyelid? On most people, especially young women, it's a flat-ish plane.
Philippe faraut's female head planes (btw, faraut should be in every 3d artist's reference folder)
Also, of course, as a matter of style, there's rarely a reason to imply the form of the lower eyelid at all on a cartoonish or idealized woman. It's just not a very major form on young women and eyeliner and makeup is typically used to hide it.
Anddd another small update, just gone through and sorted out the AO layer and added some more material definition in. Rendering these out from marmoset now too.
Just a simple output video from marmoset (video stop set to mesh turntable) then imported into photoshop constrained to every 4 frames, then just saved it out as a gif, quite a fair bit of dithering going on though
This is very cool, it shows a strong, unified direction and has a lot of good, subtle stuff going for it in the painting. The shield, pants, and face especially show a lot of thought out work... But the reasons you arent satisfied with it mostly come down to pretty fundamental issues understanding how to portray materials and use color. A lot of what i did in this paintover (aside from agonizing over trying to figure out how to paint metal) actually involved SIMPLIFYING what you'd painted.
If you've got questions, pm me or hit me up on msn if im on -- supsupandaway@msn.com
Some thoughts:
-There are a couple major changes i made to the design, namely the belt, the armor, and the cape around her neck -- these are places where unclear design is making a lot more work for you on the painting side.
Good design communicates far better than great painting!
-'Contrast' is something to aim for when you're painting, but that rarely means contrast in Value like you'd get by ramping up the contrast slider in photoshop -- Contrast usually means contrast in hue, contrast in forms, contrast in hardness. Attempting to give everything a high contrast value range is almost always a mistake -- only the glossiest materials show a lot of value contrast. Most of the changes i made were to lower the value contrast and more strongly define contrast between the different types of materials.
-The secret to skintones is contrast in hues. Skin rarely varies in value all that much (seeing as it's ultra translucent) but it goes all over the place in hue and saturation. Eyedrop colors around the shadows, highlight, and midtones on skin by artists you really like and check out where they sit in the photoshop rgb box -- you'll be surprised! Baseline rule for fair skin: Midtones are deep and warm, shadows are grey and cool, highlights are light and cool.
Woah Suprore, way more then i thought i'd be getting feedback wise, bloody fantastic. The "overboard" sheet is full of great stuff and that paint over rocks. Il go back to the drawing board on chest armor design and where things join together and i'l get practising on painting reflections.
Update on the leather pants and breastplate, will get rid of those horrid black lines on the breastplate soon and make them a more saturated dark tone instead.
It all comes down to learning the fundamentals of both anatomy and painting. Stylization is no exception. I just focused on the face for this, didn't have time to go in depth. The biggest issue is the eyes. Her eyes are too close together, and she's got that kind of deer in headlights stare. As a general rule, the more you can see of someone's iris, the crazier they look. As a general rule of thumb, make the upper eyelid come down to where it's just about touching the pupil. Try not to use hard blacks in textures, and especially not for makeup. If i were you I'd avoid mirroring her face, it's worth it to find the uv space for the whole face, since it looks weird when her eye specs are coming from different angles, and the hair is casting no shadow. Re-read all the good tips you've gotten in this thread, painting things as a part of a whole instead of just individual elements is very good advice. I see you've started doing that, but you can still do better. I'm not good with words, so I hope my paintover speaks for itself. To sum up: Back to basic art fundamentals!
I'd recommend doing some changes to the mesh as well, since just texture painting won't get the job done here. To touch quickly upon that, you should bring out the corners of her eyes a bit more, they are very deep at the moment, adding to her sort of crazy look. You can also afford shaping the nose and mouth area properly, take the polies out of glove details or the eyeball mesh if you're on a strict budget. (I'd take out those anyways, btw, and add more interest other places, like volume to the cloak around her neck, some extra strands of hair etc. Your topology seems to be an uneven mix of lowpoly and mid-poly style modeling.) Her neck is also very butch for someone with such a petite, stylized physique.
//edit: Also remember that eyes receive shadows like every other object.
//edit2: I like your attitude and willingness to learn, good progress through the thread. I'll be watching.
Hey Slash, thanks alot for the write up and paint overs.
The face does indeed look very crazy in comparison to your revision haha, i will be sure to fix it up as best i can. Unfortunely, the mesh was made following a "tutorial" given to us from our lecturer, so the topology has to match that of the tutorial (meaning i can't remove the very unnessessary glove details). But we can add topology, so i may just even out other areas to match in detail (smooth out the pauldrons etc). The head itself is unwrapped to be unmirrored, the eyes however share UV space, so i'l have to fix that (theres plenty of space to do that). I also noticed you painted very subtle teeth into your paint over, i like the idea of this, but how should i go about it, simply an alpha plane placed inside the mouth? I'l have a crack at painting some more of the face tommorow.
Personally i wouldn't bother with modeling the open mouth at all, I'd just paint it all in texture. But if it's a requirement, then yeah, an alpha plane could work. The reason I painted her teeth is that you left her mouth open, so something should be seen there, not just a black hole. Whatever you end up doing, don't be too overt about it. I've seen lots of teeth that look super shiny bright in many a model's mouth, and you end up with the same kind of problem as you had with the white in her eyes. Always consider the whole picture.
Here's an update on the face so far, i've adjusted the model to have the eyes slightly further apart and not so sunken into the head. Also added an alpha plane for teeth and gave the eyes seperate UV space. Added an edge loop into the neck to give it a thinner shape too. Still need to add freckles back in and attempt some kind of hair highlights.
Any better?
Going to be updating this thread alot more often now, as i'm going to get this character "finished" so that i can start doing some work on the MUTANT contest
I think the eyes could be pushed apart a bit further, she seems slightly crosseyed at the moment. But the progress is noticeable, she's looking better with each update, keep it up!
Replies
@Xaltar, I switch between the two views, no idea why.. but i've been taking screenshots in ortho too :x so i'll do perspective ones instead now.
@Haiasi, Thanks man! Here's a new version, i've rounded out the shape of both the eye and the eyebrow and changed the bottom lip shape, hue and highlights a little, hopefully this is what you were thinking of.
And as a reference to progress.... here's the same SDK i attempted about 4 months ago ...haha...
http://i1114.photobucket.com/albums/k535/gilesr/robinheadturnaround.jpg
I would simplify some of the textures of your face as well(look at Demonprincess' Paint-over). I think some of your values are too dark and inconsistent. Try and smooth them out a bit so they look like gradients more.
I did simplify the head texture down to a very smooth version like in Demonprincess' paint over, but it lost alot of its.. manlyness, (almost looked like a child), which is why i went and added some stubble and stuff to make it look a bit more rugged. Would be nice to see if anybody can come up with a work around for smooth gradients but still not look baby-faced, im not sure how i'd achieve that look :S.
I'm pretty sure i understand what you mean by the shading this time, having done it on the lava head, but i did a paint over just to double check that i havn't got the wrong idea before i go ahead and start changing stuff on the texture:
Thanks again!
Also, I'm not sure how you've uv-mapped your model but if there are no overlapping face uv's then you could add a shadow under the straw of hair in his forehead.
Time for a new SDK to paint!
But really awesome job, you put a lot of effort into this one and it shows
Ok, i started having a crack at the god-like SDK which is MOP's goblin, i was pretty happy with this to start with and then i scrolled through the goblin thread and i suddenly felt very sub-par
That tat on his forehead is meant to be glowing, i thought it would be interesting to have a secondary light source, but i'm having trouble selling it as 'glowing' right now. Any tips on that would be amazing too!
early WIP, same deal, crits crits crits pleaseeee
Working on the characters shield as a warm up, this is where im at so far, need crits on making it look better
When a face is just not working out, your best bet is to go back to reality. You can't really pull off a good stylized face if you can't model a good realistic face. I suggest you get some good front and side view photos of a real person, and match up the mesh to that.
I can recommend this site for some free references:
http://free-textures.got3d.com/natural/free-character-references/index.html
Jessica: yea the eyebrows were coming at a later date, i always stick them on after i get the forehead looking right for some reason, just find it easier, even if they are on a different layer! agreed with the dip, i took out an edgeloop from there aswell as it wasnt needed.
DemonPrincess: I know exactly what you mean by reality being a better study, and its something i really should do, but unfortunately this model falls under a school project to "create a stylised character"... even though we havnt been tasked to make a realistic one yet.. i think it was a tactic to make people stay inside of maya and not go sculpting crazy detail in zbrush yet... but it just ended up confusing half the class:/
I will definately start making a realistic face along side this as an extra study, but for now, im going to have to stick with this one... did a few mesh tweaks, added some stuff (stolen slipgates SDK hair technique/style)... think this is looking less scary now?
Anyways, the head has definitely improved a lot so far.
Even for a stylized head though, I would still use references, especially for stuff like ear and nose anatomy.
Here's a paint-over with some suggestions:
Stalking this thread for now.
Cheers 9skulls! more to come very soon!
This is actually getting to a pretty nice stage. A quick levels adjustment to increase the contrast goes a very long way on this project.
In your levels adjustment, bring your left and right most arrows closer in towards your histogram to get a proper range of light in the texture, it looks a lot better.
Here's another update based on the paint over, ear is still ugly
I'd check the nose again though, and what I did in the paint-over.
You'll still want to flesh out the underside of the nose, as it's looking very flat on your mesh. Also, where the upper lip transistions into the nose, you have it caving in really far, giving her a slightly duck-lipped appearance.
Thanks!
Don't introduce shadows and forms just for the sake of having them -- think about what every shadow says about the shape of the model. For example: Why is there a crevice in her face between her lower eyelid and the cheeks? Are the sides of her temple really exposed directly to the lightsource, or is that creating a confusing shape? Is the jaw rendered consistently with the other shapes on the face, or is it overly defined?
I can do a paintover if you really need, but use the eye as an example and think about it: What is the shape of the lower eyelid? On most people, especially young women, it's a flat-ish plane.
Philippe faraut's female head planes (btw, faraut should be in every 3d artist's reference folder)
http://philippefaraut.com/store/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/f/e/femaleplanes1_2.jpg
And bridgman's pages on eyes
http://www.archive.org/stream/constructiveanat00briduoft#page/130/mode/2up
can help quite a bit.
Also, of course, as a matter of style, there's rarely a reason to imply the form of the lower eyelid at all on a cartoonish or idealized woman. It's just not a very major form on young women and eyeliner and makeup is typically used to hide it.
This is very cool, it shows a strong, unified direction and has a lot of good, subtle stuff going for it in the painting. The shield, pants, and face especially show a lot of thought out work... But the reasons you arent satisfied with it mostly come down to pretty fundamental issues understanding how to portray materials and use color. A lot of what i did in this paintover (aside from agonizing over trying to figure out how to paint metal) actually involved SIMPLIFYING what you'd painted.
If you've got questions, pm me or hit me up on msn if im on -- supsupandaway@msn.com
Some thoughts:
-There are a couple major changes i made to the design, namely the belt, the armor, and the cape around her neck -- these are places where unclear design is making a lot more work for you on the painting side.
Good design communicates far better than great painting!
-'Contrast' is something to aim for when you're painting, but that rarely means contrast in Value like you'd get by ramping up the contrast slider in photoshop -- Contrast usually means contrast in hue, contrast in forms, contrast in hardness. Attempting to give everything a high contrast value range is almost always a mistake -- only the glossiest materials show a lot of value contrast. Most of the changes i made were to lower the value contrast and more strongly define contrast between the different types of materials.
-The secret to skintones is contrast in hues. Skin rarely varies in value all that much (seeing as it's ultra translucent) but it goes all over the place in hue and saturation. Eyedrop colors around the shadows, highlight, and midtones on skin by artists you really like and check out where they sit in the photoshop rgb box -- you'll be surprised! Baseline rule for fair skin: Midtones are deep and warm, shadows are grey and cool, highlights are light and cool.
I went a bit overboard on the crazy stream of consciousness notes. Messy, sorry! Hopefully some of what's in there will help out -- I tried to identify where it looks like you're having trouble and target that stuff. If you have any questions, ask.
gilesruscoe: I can see some very nice improvements on this thread mate, Keep it up Ill be following :thumbup::thumbup:
@funk, thanks man!
Also a quick paint over to see where i'l probably go with the contrast issue:
I'd recommend doing some changes to the mesh as well, since just texture painting won't get the job done here. To touch quickly upon that, you should bring out the corners of her eyes a bit more, they are very deep at the moment, adding to her sort of crazy look. You can also afford shaping the nose and mouth area properly, take the polies out of glove details or the eyeball mesh if you're on a strict budget. (I'd take out those anyways, btw, and add more interest other places, like volume to the cloak around her neck, some extra strands of hair etc. Your topology seems to be an uneven mix of lowpoly and mid-poly style modeling.) Her neck is also very butch for someone with such a petite, stylized physique.
//edit: Also remember that eyes receive shadows like every other object.
//edit2: I like your attitude and willingness to learn, good progress through the thread. I'll be watching.
The face does indeed look very crazy in comparison to your revision haha, i will be sure to fix it up as best i can. Unfortunely, the mesh was made following a "tutorial" given to us from our lecturer, so the topology has to match that of the tutorial (meaning i can't remove the very unnessessary glove details). But we can add topology, so i may just even out other areas to match in detail (smooth out the pauldrons etc). The head itself is unwrapped to be unmirrored, the eyes however share UV space, so i'l have to fix that (theres plenty of space to do that). I also noticed you painted very subtle teeth into your paint over, i like the idea of this, but how should i go about it, simply an alpha plane placed inside the mouth? I'l have a crack at painting some more of the face tommorow.
Thanks again!
Personally i wouldn't bother with modeling the open mouth at all, I'd just paint it all in texture. But if it's a requirement, then yeah, an alpha plane could work. The reason I painted her teeth is that you left her mouth open, so something should be seen there, not just a black hole. Whatever you end up doing, don't be too overt about it. I've seen lots of teeth that look super shiny bright in many a model's mouth, and you end up with the same kind of problem as you had with the white in her eyes. Always consider the whole picture.
Any better?
Going to be updating this thread alot more often now, as i'm going to get this character "finished" so that i can start doing some work on the MUTANT contest
Havn't done much more on the texture yet, but rig is made and half skinned to her (alot of funky shit going down with the weights still though)