Whipping up some simple colors to test in-game to make sure that the texture is sharp enough. I had to include many things into the armor slot so I wasn't sure if the texture would be sharp enough or not. Although some parts aren't as sharp as I wanted, it's not much of a problem (I think).
His spec looks really weird so I don't give him any spec. The spec looks really pixelated, it's like the resolution for the mask maps are really low. I'm still chipping away at the rigging, still have a lot of clipping to fix. I swear I will never ever do another storm set again after this one :poly122:
Really looking good Sylei, I feel you could push the metalness more though.
The glow on the staff is really weak too imo. (probably needs brighter colors (as the ingame illum is very weak)
The book is great, in your wips I thought it was just going to be a belt slot, this is very cool.
Ah, Valve and quick rigging
So should I rig my model to follow the distorted horrible rigging Valve has set forth on the low poly (notice beard is stretching back through face and neck/collar is stretched up high (worse in back).
Or should I keep it rigged 'properly' in case they ever fix it?
Or should I properly weight it and submit a fix? lolz
=============
Also starting to work on names for items.
Does Valve tend to stick with submitted names or do they usually rename like they do in TF2?
Also starting to work on names for items.
Does Valve tend to stick with submitted names or do they usually rename like they do in TF2?
Depending on the name and the item they may keep it or they might rename it. All the items in the Gyro set I worked on kept their names, and they named the set based of the item names. For the rig I would say if you can fix the weighting on it, then I would do that and submit it.
after a little talk with r13 we decided to give the extension for submitting until the 30.april. to make sure this does not result in a harm for people who did match the original deadline, everyone can use those additional 2 weeks to polish up things (or not).
BUT since we want to protect from abuse we also decided to not accept new projects to the event that have not been already registered and posted wips until today.
yeah. both u and also jlem did register to this event very early. i had already both of u in the spreadsheet as "looking for collabopartner". now i did just update ur status with ur set
I'm registered and had planned to post the finished sculpt this afternoon of my project. Not sure if that means I am DQ now but i'll post everything sans the weapon which is WIP. I still intend to finish by the original deadline though so I'll just keep plugging away on this.
Yay! We should be able to finish our Mirana now! I also forgot to mention a few weeks back we picked up Ertz to do our loading screen for the Earth Spirit set, other than that, nothing new to add yet from me. And Shock that lion is looking soooo good, cant wait to see him all finished up!
Hawf, have you thought about adding any patches or insignias to the back of the jacket? It might just be me but the back view is kinda boring, just a big sheet of blue.
Trying to set up a turntable in Marmoset Toolbag.
The alpha on the diffuse doesn't show so I've added it (creating a brand new material afterwards) to the normal map and chacked 'alpha from normal'.
Diffuse textures completed for our Lich set Prophet9 and I are working on! Feels great to get back on painting textures. Bear with the lack of alphas around the veil (I can't seem to render it well at Maya, pardon my terrible technical knowledge). Now onto masks, wish us luck
@Nannou, I feel like you added too much detail to the sculpt. It conflicts 2 problems from what I know:
1. Comparing it too Puck's original "skin", it looks way too torn up and has an almost "rocky" feel to it. I think you can compare the skin of puck to a salamander or any other amphibian; It's just slimy and has a "clean" look to it.
2. with the low budget on the texture sizes for Puck items, many of the details will not be able to be seen in-game, thus creating a lot of noise.
Anyways, just some things to think about. Looking good so far though!
Pluggin' away on this all day. (loadscreen, can be cropped to the 3 sizes and keep heros in view)
I still need to do the smoke from the lamp, maybe tighten up the ground a bit. Could use feedback.
Pluggin' away on this all day. (loadscreen, can be cropped to the 3 sizes and keep heros in view)
I still need to do the smoke from the lamp, maybe tighten up the ground a bit. Could use feedback.
Well, the background doesn't really do well with the stone ground that alchemist is standing on. Try to use like a desert looking background instead.
The smoke coming from the body of Razzil isn't really blending that well together. I think you can easily fix this by using the smudge tool in Photoshop.
Finally, I think you can make it a little less dark and try to make the colors just a little bit more vibrant.
Overall, this set looks really good! Good luck with it!
Baddcog : The sets looks great, but I think you are making your own job way more complicated than it needs to be for the loading screen illustration. In other words : a little bit of planning will save you tons of headaches !
A few tips :
- Don't start a loading screen illustration by randomly placing a camera in 3d space until "something looks cool". Try to imagine that the picture is a shot taken from a movie, seen through the lens of a real camera (or a movie poster, if you are compositing multiple pictures together) ; that will help you find a solid, readable and simple composition.
- Careful with the camera going in and out of focus. A lens cannot focus on something (genie), blur out something (smoke) then focus again (Alchemist).
- If anything, try to get most of the loading screen work achieved straight in Marmoset ! This will save you a ton of time. You could look at the illustration work of Moby Francke, see what makes it work (strong lighting, and so on), and create that look straight in the viewer. http://theinspirationgrid.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/illustration-moby-francke-01.jpg
I hope this helps ! Good luck, and just keep it simple
I thought about it a bit and...well, I'll comment to the replies so you know what I was thinking, maybe it will help with future crits.
1:re background.
Desert is a good idea, and initially that was kind of the idea. But the lore is that he found the lamp while mining so it morphed into thinking about a cave (ie: dark colors, purple/blue, etc..)
Problem there is that he doesn't get the armor until after he releases djinn goblin.
But... the load screen is to promote the set so...
2: I suck at this so yeah, generic background, lol... Not that that's what I want..
Guess I justified that because tons of Dota sets have 'blurry magic' backgrounds. They look better but... Still, you are right, even if it is an OK background, it's not really fitting.
3: I actually thought about the camera angle a bit. I want somewhat of a comic book style camera angle. Not quite a typical 'movie camera angle'.
Again, you are right I botched it.
I want it to feel as though the Djinn is escaping and super stoked. I really want to emphasize the height and that the ogre is surprised, etc..
When I posed it I had a different angle, but in Marmoset changed it to better fit/fill the desktop. And I feel that is the major issue.
I also didn't get the FOV correct.
It's good to have other sets of eyes for this stuff.
4:I suck at this stuff.
5: The smoke is just the blurred out model, I do intend to paint it better. The model was tough to fit in the poly/tex restraints, and by the time I 'de-rigged' it to pose it it was looking pretty rough. So I just blurred it out as rough reference.
I will definitely check out those links, thanks.
I did a quick (5 min) redo with a marmoset render that matches my original intentions better. And also more of a desert background. At this point I think the ground itself will also be redone, but I see it as him standing on top of a cliff...
Sounds good man ! These promo pictures sure are hard to put together (especially near the end of a project, after so many hours spent on the models already!). On the plus side, they are great practice as they force us to work outside of our comfort zone. Everybody becomes better thanks to them.
I think the choice of a real sky and background will fit the image better, indeed. Abstract magic backgrounds have their time and place, but here your image is clearly shot "on location" so that's a different scenario straight away.
From there I would suggest you to focus on unifying the lighting, and probably adding atmospherics in order to tie everything together. Here are some example of that : https://vimeo.com/100095868
And as a final piece of advice : reference, reference, reference ! I keep repeating this on Skype and here, but really, there is zero point in trying to guess anything when it comes to picture making. This applies to the lighting of the characters (you just have to find a scene lit similarly in a movie, which in your case should be super easy with films like Star Wars, Lawrence of Arabia and the Prince of Persia movie all being filled with similar shots) ; the surfacing of the cliff (which real life mountain was your floor ground inspired from ?) and the background. Just remember that any time "saved" by jumping straight in Photoshop is ultimately wasted when compared to the time it takes to fiddle around until things work. For instance you could also take the time to a color study, so that even colors are locked down before you get to put together the final image : http://blog.mitchalbala.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/sharkey-4-color-studies.jpg
However, a value study would have to come first - but this can be done by converting your current image to black and white and working off that.
no wips to show today, but very glad to hear about the extension - even with it, its going to be tight as my animator is a bit snowed under for the next few weeks...right, back to work!
Messed with a promo render for the BH today. Now that the payment info is fixed Arty and I will upload the CM in a couple days and we'll upload the BH later this week or early next week.
Replies
You guys cray.
Looks great though! Wouldn't change anything.
His spec looks really weird so I don't give him any spec. The spec looks really pixelated, it's like the resolution for the mask maps are really low. I'm still chipping away at the rigging, still have a lot of clipping to fix. I swear I will never ever do another storm set again after this one :poly122:
katzeimsack, your Techies is looking amazing
Unlit diffuse from marmoset, and in game screenshots with masks
And Deadman made a quick preview video
[ame]
The glow on the staff is really weak too imo. (probably needs brighter colors (as the ingame illum is very weak)
The book is great, in your wips I thought it was just going to be a belt slot, this is very cool.
Ah, Valve and quick rigging
So should I rig my model to follow the distorted horrible rigging Valve has set forth on the low poly (notice beard is stretching back through face and neck/collar is stretched up high (worse in back).
Or should I keep it rigged 'properly' in case they ever fix it?
Or should I properly weight it and submit a fix? lolz
=============
Also starting to work on names for items.
Does Valve tend to stick with submitted names or do they usually rename like they do in TF2?
Depending on the name and the item they may keep it or they might rename it. All the items in the Gyro set I worked on kept their names, and they named the set based of the item names. For the rig I would say if you can fix the weighting on it, then I would do that and submit it.
That whole set is just perfect for him.
after a little talk with r13 we decided to give the extension for submitting until the 30.april. to make sure this does not result in a harm for people who did match the original deadline, everyone can use those additional 2 weeks to polish up things (or not).
BUT since we want to protect from abuse we also decided to not accept new projects to the event that have not been already registered and posted wips until today.
hope u are all fine with it
greez
so for everyone other check out this sheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11SCQ16Gkn3gnAiwlixbSpMeHh0D16xU_RrcpcPFQo6Q/pubhtml
go to the second tab, and if there is a green colored field behind ur project - its all fine
some ingame shots I took last month
The alpha on the diffuse doesn't show so I've added it (creating a brand new material afterwards) to the normal map and chacked 'alpha from normal'.
Still can't get it to show in preview window.
Any ideas?
thanks man!
Here is an update on the set i'm doing with slimeface. Back budget is pretty bad so it will probably change a bit.
1. Comparing it too Puck's original "skin", it looks way too torn up and has an almost "rocky" feel to it. I think you can compare the skin of puck to a salamander or any other amphibian; It's just slimy and has a "clean" look to it.
2. with the low budget on the texture sizes for Puck items, many of the details will not be able to be seen in-game, thus creating a lot of noise.
Anyways, just some things to think about. Looking good so far though!
I still need to do the smoke from the lamp, maybe tighten up the ground a bit. Could use feedback.
Well, the background doesn't really do well with the stone ground that alchemist is standing on. Try to use like a desert looking background instead.
The smoke coming from the body of Razzil isn't really blending that well together. I think you can easily fix this by using the smudge tool in Photoshop.
Finally, I think you can make it a little less dark and try to make the colors just a little bit more vibrant.
Overall, this set looks really good! Good luck with it!
A few tips :
- Don't start a loading screen illustration by randomly placing a camera in 3d space until "something looks cool". Try to imagine that the picture is a shot taken from a movie, seen through the lens of a real camera (or a movie poster, if you are compositing multiple pictures together) ; that will help you find a solid, readable and simple composition.
- Try to avoid treating the background as an afterthought. This can be addressed by simply looking for references beforehand (movie posters, paintings, existing loading screens) instead of just figuring out the background in the end.
https://www.google.fr/search?q=movie+poster&biw=1279&bih=679&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=XAMrVd6IHY7VatvTgaAD&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ
- Careful with the camera going in and out of focus. A lens cannot focus on something (genie), blur out something (smoke) then focus again (Alchemist).
- If anything, try to get most of the loading screen work achieved straight in Marmoset ! This will save you a ton of time. You could look at the illustration work of Moby Francke, see what makes it work (strong lighting, and so on), and create that look straight in the viewer.
http://theinspirationgrid.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/illustration-moby-francke-01.jpg
I hope this helps ! Good luck, and just keep it simple
I thought about it a bit and...well, I'll comment to the replies so you know what I was thinking, maybe it will help with future crits.
1:re background.
Desert is a good idea, and initially that was kind of the idea. But the lore is that he found the lamp while mining so it morphed into thinking about a cave (ie: dark colors, purple/blue, etc..)
Problem there is that he doesn't get the armor until after he releases djinn goblin.
But... the load screen is to promote the set so...
2: I suck at this so yeah, generic background, lol... Not that that's what I want..
Guess I justified that because tons of Dota sets have 'blurry magic' backgrounds. They look better but... Still, you are right, even if it is an OK background, it's not really fitting.
3: I actually thought about the camera angle a bit. I want somewhat of a comic book style camera angle. Not quite a typical 'movie camera angle'.
Again, you are right I botched it.
I want it to feel as though the Djinn is escaping and super stoked. I really want to emphasize the height and that the ogre is surprised, etc..
When I posed it I had a different angle, but in Marmoset changed it to better fit/fill the desktop. And I feel that is the major issue.
I also didn't get the FOV correct.
It's good to have other sets of eyes for this stuff.
4:I suck at this stuff.
5: The smoke is just the blurred out model, I do intend to paint it better. The model was tough to fit in the poly/tex restraints, and by the time I 'de-rigged' it to pose it it was looking pretty rough. So I just blurred it out as rough reference.
I will definitely check out those links, thanks.
I did a quick (5 min) redo with a marmoset render that matches my original intentions better. And also more of a desert background. At this point I think the ground itself will also be redone, but I see it as him standing on top of a cliff...
I think the choice of a real sky and background will fit the image better, indeed. Abstract magic backgrounds have their time and place, but here your image is clearly shot "on location" so that's a different scenario straight away.
From there I would suggest you to focus on unifying the lighting, and probably adding atmospherics in order to tie everything together. Here are some example of that :
https://vimeo.com/100095868
And as a final piece of advice : reference, reference, reference ! I keep repeating this on Skype and here, but really, there is zero point in trying to guess anything when it comes to picture making. This applies to the lighting of the characters (you just have to find a scene lit similarly in a movie, which in your case should be super easy with films like Star Wars, Lawrence of Arabia and the Prince of Persia movie all being filled with similar shots) ; the surfacing of the cliff (which real life mountain was your floor ground inspired from ?) and the background. Just remember that any time "saved" by jumping straight in Photoshop is ultimately wasted when compared to the time it takes to fiddle around until things work. For instance you could also take the time to a color study, so that even colors are locked down before you get to put together the final image :
http://blog.mitchalbala.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/sharkey-4-color-studies.jpg
However, a value study would have to come first - but this can be done by converting your current image to black and white and working off that.
Good luck !
Sculpt done, halfway through the first LODs.
Edit: The water-skin/bota-bag is moved to the middle and enlarged. The belt detail has been flattened to preserve texture sharpness too.
Here is our bakes for the Sniper Set! Atm Mango is doing textures!
C&C are welcome!:D
[ame="