Cyborg Assault SWAT Woman
polycounter lvl 13
UPDATE!:
So I'm doing a new thing because thats what you do. Keep doing new things and put them in your portfolio, until you get good.
So a while ago I saw this awesome illustration by Adrian Dadich and I thought hey that wold be a cool thing to do someday.
And now its someday
The goal is for a next gen realtime character in UE4 (I'll be texturing in Toolbag2 to start, final posing/lighting/etc in UE4), along with her gun. and because I hate myself, I'll be giving her a bike (a leftover from my Petrol/Blood entry that i didnt finish) as well.
I'll also be pushing things a bit farther than whats in the concept, I'll be replacing her lower legs with cyborg enhancements.
Here's the current progress on the head:
Keyshot test:
Zbrush:
and the monocycle:
There's still a ton of work to do but I think its time to share the progress and get some feedback. So as always if you see something is off and/or horrible lemme know.
Here's some of the reference I'll be using for the body.
Replies
Ive been playing with light setups while I finish her gun. This isnt a final pose or anything but its enough for me to start thinking about lights.
I think the biggest thing for the me is the composition and lack of a strong key light. My eye keeps wanting to go the strong hot highlight on the handles, and not to her face.
So first thing i did was darkened down everything in the foreground, and fudged the FOV to make her face larger and more prominent in that top left third. I found those red blocks to be rather distracting for this shot, so I made them much smaller and just used them for a light color kick on her.
For lighting I think making it more grounded and using a basic 3 point lighting setup for her face it will look a lot better. Her face is being lit from almost the back left side so the shadow is taking over the majority of the face. Also I think making the purple light a lot more subtle will help the key light look better and stronger in the scene.
Not sure what stage you are with posing and rigging but getting a facial expression with some focused eyes will really help her come to life. If she is in a vehicle she might be looking around for somebody, being chased, chasing someone, which could help tell a story with her facial expression.
Hope that helps! Keep killing it Charles.
Looking Good.
BARDLER and Scruples, thanks a ton for the paintovers, keeping what you guys said in mind I think a cross between the 2 light setups might be the happy medium. Especially if I can pull in that neon blue as a rim light along the right side of the image. I might lean closer to the warmer setup for clarity and pull the in some parts from the cooler one for contrast and oomph. Thanks again.
Also liking the new layout on PC
I kind of like how a lot of her is hidden in the shadows in the latest update. While it's not showing off the model fully, it does work well as an illustration. Agree on the rim light, though. Could be good to use one to separate the character from the background a little.
Agreed about the lighting, this wont even be the actual pose in the cycle. Im sorting through a bunch of ideas now on the best way to present her in the seat. I have put together a small mood board for the general character lighting though. Due to the fact that Im looking at 3 to 4 beauty shots in various poses, theres a lot of things I can try in terms of lighting and poses to really sell the character.
The low poly on the gun is done, time for UVs and bake.. And textures...
I procrastinated on those UVs tonight and just fiddled with posing and post effects... These wont be used in the final beauty shots.
Just seeing how far I could push TB2's post effects.Manga Style (With some balance in PS in the first one and straight outta TB2 on the second)-
And some of the post effects variations I saved off-
I'll be approaching the texturing in a similar fashion to how I handled the character; It's a maintained weapon. Its been used but it doesnt look like its been through hell and back.
@genius Thanks!
Or you could just bake everything in 16bit forever and ever until the end of time. I think this makes the most sense workflow wise; it's probably recommended to let the engine handle the downsampling/dithering in most cases anyway (or doing more tricksy stuff like combining dithered and non-dithered maps as mentioned in the bit-depth and banding thread). It's occasionally even worth baking say a curvature map in 16bit if you're going to be using it for masking stuff and heavily abusing the levels adjustments (which I've found myself doing a lot in Substance Painter).
This is the clean material pass. I'll be doing labels and branding and then doing a wear/grit/decolorization pass after (and changing the leather grip under the barrel to rubber)... And then that should be it. then i can do final poses and lighting.
Now that Quixel 2 is out I'll break it in on the final gun work. In the mean time here's the poses Im torn between. I'll only be using 2 of these (and the cycle poses will be a different set), so which of these 3 is the weakest?
These are the same poses just full body for context-
and here are some stupid hi res shots:
http://i.imgur.com/SDTVdzu.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/aKx50X1.jpg
Lucy Lui was my reference
(Green): I've noticed that eyes are actually remarkably small, and when you see photos of girls, their eyes oftentimes seem to be bigger than they really are, due to makeup, fake eyelashes, etc. The green portion is how much of the eye is actually showing; in this case it's almost twice as much.
(Blue): Eyebrows are also great at being misleading, they can be in a variety of shapes, but are essentially icing on the cake; you want to look at the underlying skull/brow area. in my experience, the supraorbital margin is fairly flat, with just a slight curve.
(Purple): Skin folds can end in some fairly sharp lines, and, while subtle, make a huge difference.
Hope that helps... I'm trying to learn this stuff too. Female faces are the trickiest thing I've ever worked with...
Thanks for the feedback but I think you may have confused the first post which is almost a year old (And pinned to the top of every page) with the final face sculpt. The head went through a bit more iteration and some changes to get a happy medium between the likeness the concept and what I wanted the final look to be in the end.
I isolated the the current head and setup a some neutral lighting to give a better example-
You pointed out a lot of things that are spot on. Some of them like the eyes were intentional and other things are just due to the fact that this project is getting pretty old, but I will keep them in mind for upcoming projects. Thanks again!
Thanks everyone for all your help and crits over the course of this project.
There are little things I could adjust here and there but it's time to move on.
Ive uploaded Viewer files on Artstation as well-
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/n42Z4
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/4alw1
You did a fantastic job of translating the concept to 3D. I really dig the renders of her and the Cycle. Its not often that character artists can pull off a character/vehicle combo in their presentation.
Whatever you decided to accomplish for your next body of work, I would recommend working on another head. Looks like you made good momentum on this previous head sculpt, so take that energy and push the next one you make to the next level!
I learned a lot with this project and after a year Im itching to do something even better with all my momentum
It's been fun to see you working on this in the hangouts and always trying to incorporate new workflows, techniques, and critiques into the piece. Definitely paid off in the end!