After a few days of sitting on the fence as to which race to go with I've decided to go with an alien.

Here's my reference.



update edit:

Still very WIP.

Well, the retopo process was long and probably wouldn't be necessary if I had a more powefull computer but it does allow me to be more efficient with my sculpting. Here's what I have so far. I had to scrap the shoulder-pads I was working on as they didn't look right. I'll have to get back to that later tonight.

Now I'm off to watch a traditional Christmas movie like Die Hard.

excellent!

the alien race was always my favorite for receivers!

Thanks man, that means a lot coming from you. Also, yeah, not enough representation of the aliens in this contest is what lead me to choose this over the obvious skeleton.



So the shoulder pads, they went through several designs but I think I like these best. I wanted something chitinous like the Tyranids in Warhammer 40k, almost as if they had some kind of mutation that allowed them to grow shoulder pads. Hopefully this adds to the silhouette and breaks up the monotony of soft shapes that was going on around that area before.

Late night question time!

So I'm currently sitting at about 2900 tris with any more optimization likely causing serious issues with either the silhouette deformation or both. Should I try to optimize more, creating a blocky low poly mesh that I feel wouldn't be up to the standards I've seen in this contest (still only barely making it in under 2700) or cheat as hard as possible and create something that looks better?

limitations are limitations. just imagine having your character show up in a game with 10 fps or with 30. if your cool with him having a softer siluette but been shown only in 10fps then go for it

Post some wireframe images of the low poly. Perhaps you can get some feedback on where to save and optimize the mesh.

I'd have to see wires.

Ok, here's the wires at 2692.

Well I guess 2692 is within the limits for this competition. so this would be fine. However if you wish to optimize a bit I would consider removing the geometry for each of the tooths and 1. Make a plane and do a flat projection of the teeths with double sided geometry or 2. Just close the mouth all together and get the teeths in the texture and normal maps instead. Keep the two big teeths as geometry as they add sillouet.

the tiny bevel you have on the 'ankle' isn't necessary.
it looks like you modeled in the fingernails too. that's not needed.
you can collapse one of the rows on the bicep.
the tiny bevel on the forehead isn't needed either.
I also see a couple rows you can close up on the face and you wouldn't even notice it.

Thanks for the help guys, I managed to get it down to around 2650 tris. Ishii is right about the teeth, I've thought a lot about it and I'm going to leave it as because using alphas and double-sided tris would only cut the mesh down by about 40 triangles. I probably should have closed the mouth, but that would require going back and redesigning a part of the character. Also this allows for the possibility of some fun animations.

Anyway, time to stop obsessing over optimizing the mesh and move on to obsessing on optimizing the UVs. That deadline's creeping up quickly.

Wow, the bake came out really well.

Thanks Tamarin, nDo2 is pretty great when it comes to solving problems with AO.