What’s up guys? I just finished my last semester at school, and I am about to begin an internship. I really need to create some nice content for my portfolio to eventually get a job, and this here is to be one of my first pieces (I have other stuff up now, but not quite good enough imo).

I took a couple of days to work out a concept and here is where I am at now. I plan on treating this similar to the DWIII challenge with rules and regulations, but I will attempt to use the least polys possible whille looking like a next gen character. At this point, I want to do a character that is somewhat simplistic, as I don’t want something overly challenging quite yet.

Any crits welcome…

I have been working hard on this model and I now have him preped for high poly sculpt work (in mudbox). Most of the high poly smoothing modeling is done at this point.

Crits and/or comments are welcome.

Here is the wire frame and what I'll spend the majority of my time sculpting.

Here he is converted to all quad's.

Looks very Satyr.

If I had one crit it would be the hooves. They come off as too big, like they belong on a creature five times his body mass.

Good luck.

Right now, I figure I am about half way through sculpting. Most of the forms are roughed in but it certainly could use much tweaking still. I just finished SubD 3 and I plan on going up to SubD5 or 6 so much detail to do as of yet. Although, I should probably be smart and save the really high detail stuff like skin pores and so fourth for 2d generation.

georgemancer- Thanks for the reply. Honestly, I had to look up Satyr on wiki before I knew what you meant, but yeah he definitely does look the part in those screen shots. Nevertheless, I am actually going for a more demon look as you can probably see from the concept art, but this sculpt should capture that a lot more. I simply wasn't sure how to handle the face previously as I still only had a hazy idea of what I wanted to do for it.

As for the hooves being too big, I’ll play with the proportions of that soon. It might give him too much of a cartoony look with the current scale of the hooves so I may pull it back a bit, however; I still kind of like the style.


As always Critique or comments would be appreciated.

I’m not sure if I am happy with, or if I will ever actually show his lower face, but I figured I would post to here to see what people think.

It’s supposed to be like the lower portion of his face has no skin, and is showing through to the bone there. This should make it clear he is a demon; and when I am done one should be able to slightly see the line where the skin is ripped off along the edge of the mask. Currently, as I am only working with the lower subdivisions I can’t show this too well, but when I am capable of adding further detail in the higher subd’s it should be obvious(when I can create the transition of skin to no skin layers).

Looking good
I suggest you add some finer lines on the horns/hooves, though

wow, amazing work!

Well, I think I am done with the high poly sculpt. Now it's on to creating a low poly mesh as long as I don't find any big mistakes with this high poly soon.

Conte- thanks for the encouragement, this is turning out to be the first sculpt of mine I actually like.

SuPa- Yep, I added quite a bit of surface detail after all. The only reason I didn't do more detail sooner was that with the previous poly count I couldn't.

Please keep the comments and critiques coming, I think this is my personal best character and every critique helps.

WITH MASK


WITHOUT MASK

step back a few levels and have another go at some of that anatomy.

Stimpack- Thanks for the quick reply! Where specifically do you mean with the anatomy? Sorry, but I have been looking at it so long, I need really concise feedback.

The anatomy issues that I’m seeing are the proportions. I understand that you’re going for a kind of stylized or "cartoony" look but your characters torso feels a little too stretched like his spine couldn’t support his massive upper body.

To pin point it I would have to say adjust the relation between the rib cage and the hips. It feels like there's way too much distance between the top of the hips and the bottom of the rib cage. It also feels like his rib cage is broken or seriously deformed you may be able to get away with that I’m not sure. Just looking at your 3 quarter front view bothers me the way the sternum just feels almost perpendicular to the ribcage. Also the grove in the lower back for his spine seems too deep especially for his posture.

Looking at your low poly I think you should add a few more edge loops to his fore arm at least two more. One above and below the one loop you have at least. Also there seems to be some awkward edge loop termination in his face, sternum and wrist. Some closer screen shots of those areas would help to see what’s going on.

I don't know if you've ever had to rig or animate a character but I think it’s a good idea to model as if you were going to. The way the low poly looks now it will probably deform undesirably when animated.

That’s what bothers me. Other than that nice job on the fine details, what are you using to sculpt mudbox?

Wilex- That's a great Crit, thanks!

I will definetly go back and play with some of the stuff you mentioned on the high poly, and yes its mudbox (I started to learn sculpt on zbrush but I now like mudbox way more).

As for the low poly, I am actually going to trash that. I just created the original low poly for the high poly sculpt.
I will make a better low poly by taking subd level 2 from my sculpt and removing loops and tweaking from there. (I use polyboost in 3ds max that has a remove loop tool that makes it really easy).
However, I will really make an effort to make this mesh usable when I am done by keeping deformation and animation in mind when I make it. I don't do animation really, and its something that I often over look so good point there too.

I took Wilex's advice and changed the torso area up; focusing on the areas he mentioned (small of back, hips, ribs and so fourth).
I admit, I kind of made anatomy up in that area my first time through instead of looking at references.
Now he should hopefully be somewhat anatomically correct (for a demon creature).
The one thing I realize that I did not do is bring the lats down and around the ribs as much as I should.
Therefore, his lats are extremely small, but I did this to maintain the characters tapered silhouette.

Unless anyone has any other important things to point out that I missed, its on to the low poly build.

Here are the changes I made, and I threw in a close up of the hands for the hell of it.

I think he looks a lot better balanced now. I don't see any other issues really. Your detail passes look excellent, just keep pushing it.

Always check reference it will make things a lot easier. Even though your character is a demon he still has the upper body of a human and the legs of a goat. It's pretty difficult to make up anatomy. Nature has done a pretty good job of creating all kinds of body parts that function well and look nice so just take from it.

Keep up the work, let’s see that low poly wire frame as soon as you get it going.

i still have the feeling that he's not the right kind of guy for beeing an assassin, at least not a subtle one

Wilex - Thanks again man. I am re-doing my portfolio site today, so tommarrow i'll be back to work on the low poly mesh.

Sekneox- Yeah, you could probably hear him coming from a mile away with those hooves, ha ha. But I'm not too worried, the theme isn't really a big concern of mine. But thanks for pointing that out.

It's looking good man!

btw, you ever drop by school? we still need to get together sometime and you can teach me a thing or two. I am taking the semester off to work on my portfolio so i am not really around school much, you drink coffee?

-joe

Hey, it's looking good so far! I really like your mudbox details. Keep up the good work!

the details are too washed out/blobby, spend more time on the middle levels ;) shaping up nicely !

I just rebuilt the low poly from scratch.
I originally was planning on removing loops off subd level 2, but I didn't like how that was going (didn't like the mesh flow); so I used polyboost build tool to create this mesh a new instead.
Right now, I figured I would post what I have for critiques while I work on his low poly clothing/armor/weapon. This lowpoly hasn't been tweaked much so I am sure there are issues to fix.

Jnat- Thanks, send me an email and we could meet up some time then. You can find my hotmail email under the resume section of my portfolio site. Yeah, I drink coffee, lots of it.

Tai- Thanks, I think if I can keep making progress in my mudbox skills I believe it will be the key to me landing a job; so much appreciated.

Johny- I sent you a private message asking if you could explain a bit more what you mean. I will definitely go back and re-work it once I figure out exactly what I need to do.

Your low poly model seems to have odd edge flow to me. It also looks like there is some unnecessary edges that could be cleaned up.

In my opinion you should always model your characters to be animated. At this point it looks like you'd get some deformation issues when animating this character.

You should go back and try to get at least three edge loops for the major joints. Also try to remove triangles in areas that are going to bend and stretch as they don't always deform well.

Specifically your Knee's look like they need to have the edges reworked and the spacing between edge loops on your lower back needs to be adjusted possibly another loop added.

You might also want to check out some books on character modeling they usually explain what type of edge work is necessary for proper deformation and what you can get away with.

Wilex- Thanks for the reply once again. I am on the fence as to what I should do in regards to the low poly. Of course adding edge loops would be easy to do, and cleaning up the triangles as well, because almost all of them are just an attempt to merge loops to save on the poly count.
So my question is, for portfolio pieces is it more important to have a low poly count, or have the character set up for proper distortion when animating. I am always uncertain of how to handle this and I just don't know what the majority of industry professionals want to see in these matters.
For example, many of the DWIII entries are not suitable for animating, but that is because they are meant only to meet the polycount and look "bad ass" once posed. It would really helpful if I get some sort of rule of thumb for this, as it is truly a balancing act between polycount and proper mesh deformation.