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SmessierDumps - Character Art

polycounter lvl 9
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smessier polycounter lvl 9
Figured I'd start a character thread. You can see more of my work at www.smessierobjects.com.

Some new work for Terra, the same game I built the space marine dude for. You can see the game in progress at http://starcave.net. Most of the stuff they have online is older, and they're busy putting together a new demo for GDC. Definitely check them out.

This guy's sculpted and retopoed/Uved in Zbrush, textured in DDO/Photoshop, and rendered in Marmoset 2. He's contained in a single UV space, at 4096 rez textures, and has Diffuse/Gloss/Specular/Normal/Translucency/Emissive maps.

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  • smessier
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    smessier polycounter lvl 9
    Revisiting an older character study in my spare time. Purely testing out normal bakes and shaders. He has almost unchanged DDO skin textures, and was quickly zremeshed and UVed in Zbrush, so there are definitely some changes that need to be made, but I want to get him to a full quality bust within the next few weeks. Maybe people have some ideas on where I could take this guy?

    Looking to schedule up more work for the coming months. I'll be heading out to GDC next week so things are ramping up to be very busy, but let's start getting the conversations rolling this weekend.

    screenshot0003png
  • smessier
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    smessier polycounter lvl 9
    Finished (mostly) the texturing for this personal project to create the motion tracker from "Alien". Planning on adding frayed alpha edges to the strap, and having a more grounded render of the tracker, but after texturing today I just needed some satisfying renders of it.

    2 4K texture sets, optimized for UE4 (condensed metal/rough maps), and the model sits around the 5K poly range. Low poly modeled in Maya, textured entirely in Substance Painter. It's an amazing program.

    screenshot000png
  • malibubob
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    malibubob polycounter lvl 8
    Hey, just stopping by to say nice work! This came out great!
    I made one of these awhile back, its cool to see how you approached it. Nice details!

    devon-fay-devon-fay-tracker-01.jpg?1408508473
  • smessier
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    smessier polycounter lvl 9
    Did some further tweaking on this guy, brought him into substance painter to try out skin texturing. It works pretty damn well. He's still very much a WIP, and I might make him into a full character. We'll see how that goes. I pulled reference from Bryan Cranston, with some Clint Eastwood thrown in, although without realizing it I can see him mainly as a blend between Bryan Cranston and Kevin Spacey.

    He's 4k resolution right now, and I think his head is 5-10K polys. Did some zremeshing and auto-uving, so he's a bit of a hack job right now, although I think his poly flow is pretty clean for an asymmetrical zremesh. I plan on cleaning up his UVs and reprojecting the textures via substance. I can't get enough of that program. Let me know what you all think so far.

    screenshot0001png
  • smessier
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    smessier polycounter lvl 9
    Thanks for your praise Malibubob, I appreciate it. I really like your forms and overall color palette on your motion tracker, it all fits together more cleanly than mine does. I think the painted metal on mine needs to be a bit duller, and some of the glossy elements a bit toned down. There's always tweaks to be made. Thanks again man.
  • smessier
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    smessier polycounter lvl 9
    2 new characters for PVP: Heritage, their site should be online within the week.

    Rendered in Marmoset 2 and their textures are optimized for UE4. The Mage is separated into 2 4K maps and the Steampunker is in a single 4K map, with his holster/future weapons in their own separate space. Both are around 10-15K polys. Will have a greater breakdown of both characters on my site within a week.

    screenshot0101png
    screenshot015png
  • smessier
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    smessier polycounter lvl 9
    I completely spaced to reference Alex Vasilev, the modeler who built the staircase and a ton more content for PVP: Heritage. He's cranking out excellent props and environment assets, and you should definitely check out his work at http://www.alex3d.pro. He's awesome.
  • smessier
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    smessier polycounter lvl 9
    Some pre-visualization for this old guy. What do you guys think?

    oldsoldier_face.jpg

    His face looks goofy in this sketch.

    oldsoldier.jpg
  • Tetranome
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    Tetranome polycounter lvl 6
    I like your work. The cthulu and PVP characters are awesome :)
  • smessier
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    smessier polycounter lvl 9
    Thanks man, I really appreciate that. I dig your stuff too, especially the wood floor texture, it looks very clean. Nice details on it.
  • Noren
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    Noren polycounter lvl 19
    I like the alien at the top, even if it's a bit hard to read.
    The old soldier is up to a good start, too.
    The discolored spots on the skin seem way to small and "sprinkled" on though, but I guess that's just painted on top of the render for now?

    File sizes are excessive, though. I realize we don't have the year 2000 anymore, but over 50 Mb is too much for what's shown, if you ask me. E.g. that last sketch doesn't really benefit from having over 1 Mb.
  • smessier
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    smessier polycounter lvl 9
    Thanks Noren, yeah the head render is just a paint over. I don't think too hard about file sizes, is it taking too long to load the page?

    I agree about the alien, I should do a bit more of a relaxed t-pose render for it. Maybe when I get it on my site.
  • Noren
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    Noren polycounter lvl 19
    "is it taking too long to load the page? " Well, I'm not mentioning it because I habitually check the file size of any image I come across. ;)
    Not saying that it has to be the same for everyone, though,and it does load after a while.
    No need to resave them, either, just something to keep in mind, perhaps.
  • smessier
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    smessier polycounter lvl 9
    New renders of the motion tracker, you can see more and even download the OBJ, textures, and Marmoset render scene at www.smessierobjects.com/folio/motiontracker/. Let me know what you think.

    screenshot011png
  • smessier
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    smessier polycounter lvl 9
    (Edit) Cleaning up my threads for load times.  A video I linked here has been removed, so no sense keeping this post with a broken vid.
  • smessier
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    smessier polycounter lvl 9
    I want to put together a production tutorial series for a new personal character I'm working on. Here's the initial primer video looking at some initial concept design. Let me know what you all think, and if anyone is interested in seeing specific content.

    [ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzi08mNd0rY[/ame]
  • smessier
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    smessier polycounter lvl 9
    A design update on the scifi vet. Let me know what you think so far.

    oldsoldier_concept_v3_small.jpg
  • smessier
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    smessier polycounter lvl 9
    Been a while, so have a new character. Produced for a freelance project.

    3D Viewer: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/archer-girl-75209405-a83c-46e0-bac1-b80517983685

    screenshot002png
  • smessier
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    smessier polycounter lvl 9

    Check out more renders and info at http://smessierobjects.com/folio/furiosafan/.

    Here's a fan art game character of Charlize Theron's character Furiosa from the film Mad Max: Fury Road. I've worked on and off on her for the past few months, applying new techniques learned from ongoing freelance projects this year toward her production. I've learned a lot, and I've enjoyed everything about her.

    Some technical info: she's broken down into multiple UV sets, 3 (2048x) sets for her outfit (1 odd set for the belt chains that could have easily been combined in another set), 1 (2048x) set for her arms/chest, 1 (4096x) set for her face, 1 set originally for her entire hair, but now is just for her eyebrows/lashes, and 1 (2048x) set for her rifle. She can definitely be optimized, but she's purely a portfolio experiment so I haven't been too worried about that. Her core character meshes are at 56K polys, and her rifle is a few thousand polys. After hours of learning different hair alpha card techniques and experimentation trying to get short hair to look natural with alpha textures, I decided that the only way I'd get the look I wanted was to go with Zbrush's Fibermesh. Learning more about hair tech for different engines made me realize that current solutions for short hair really don't use alpha cards, and instead are generated dynamically or are tessellated, and I don't have that tech or knowledge yet.

    A few major things I wanted to learn from Furiosa were: to achieve a higher level of finish than I had previously attained with my work, to work with and better understand detail/tileable normals (which was why I chose to stay at 2K rez for most maps), and to restrict production to scale between complex shaders and the Unity 5 standard material. In Marmoset 2 I'm utilizing skin/microfiber shaders, alphas, translucency/emissive maps, and tiling normals with detail masks (alongside standard color/metalness/roughness/normal maps). When I have some more time I want to get her in Unity too.

  • smessier
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    smessier polycounter lvl 9
    Some new practice work to check out.  2x4K texture sets, PBR/spec.  There's more renders on artstation - [url]https://www.artstation.com/artwork/6d5G0[/url].  


  • smessier
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    smessier polycounter lvl 9
    Finished up a character I really enjoyed working on.  Produced from a concept for Caracal Games (www.downwardgame.com).  You can see more at https://www.artstation.com/artwork/RX2lm.




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