So I'm scraping some of my stupid stuff to start with low poly and go from there, I got a Nightcrawler concept from the-blueprints.com and started working from there :

Current polycount : 728 tri's (I'm trying to keep it under 800)




Tips and draw-overs very welcome

hmm, not bad. The arms aren't matching in the prifle tho. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.

The reference arms were so rotated back it just looked ****ed so I modeled the arms the same but I moved it forward to avoid it looking strange.

did a diffuse map, toes came out shit, I'll have to re-UV. Polycount is : 744 tris

Excellent improvement!
Love how you took other peoples advice and started working on this character.

Everything lookgs great.Make sure you check out as many tutorials as you can. Some popular ones would be i guess, im sure you already have checked these out...
1) One from pig (where he talks about deformation )
2) Smalls qalkthroughs on poopinmymouths site
3) That tut by athey was nice
4) I remember jay (jason lavoie) made a tutorial on how to make a low poly character

And also check out ref. and wires from inspiring and talented artists. Two of them on the back of my head would be slaught (slaughter.jimdo.com) and b11 (benregimbal.com).

As a quick ref. heres a model i made sometime ago.

The only thing i want to show you here would probably be how by rotating a 4 sided box 45 degress, you can get rid of the boxy look that you have right now. Low poly, esp., deals with the Silhouette of the model. Everything INSIDE the silhouette is painted in. So your primary and probably the only concer should be the silhouette and how you can add interest to it.... So def. check out inspiring arists and try to study their wires and try to see why each and every freaking tri is there/not there (as there will def. be a reason)


Good luck,im SURE this will rock.

Man that diffuse is killing the model.
POst your texturemap!

heres the texture map : (I know... I'm very rubbish at texturing )

theres alot of tricks to it. trick one... dont try and paint it like that. especially not to start with.. you need to have a batter idea of painting skin in the first place before you go playing with things that warp the idea (you gotta know the rule to break it). as much as possible to start with use photos if not as the texture then referance them ALOT in the texture.

for example, a better way to do his facve might be to get a face picture fromone of the billions of photo archives out there... use the facial features from them and use photoshop to change the skintone from pinky closer to the blue purple culour to give you that solid grounding in reality that all our work needs to start from

night crawler is much darker than that, and almost purple in his diffuse. the blue really comes out in his specular values.

Thanks Nistrum, I'll get to that today.

the man who has mastered 1000 kicks is not as strong as the man who has mastered 1 kick 1000 times



Keep practicing basics sir

Originally Posted by seforin

the man who has mastered 1000 kicks is not as strong as the man who has mastered 1 kick 1000 times



Keep practicing basics sir

?

lol I can't tell wtf either of you are on about.

Made some changes to the texture and added his tail

Originally Posted by Alec3d

lol I can't tell wtf either of you are on about.

It's not hard to understand they are both telling you to pretty much keep practicing. And that is EXACTLY what you need to do. Also, you love your swearing don't you?

ill tell you what. post the OBJ for your character and ill make some textures for him. ill send you the files so you can see how I would do it.. i know imnot the greatest texturing person on the forums.. but im sure it cant hurt.

SDK, SDK!!!

@ Chaos : My brain can only understand so much of what Matt said
@ Nistrum you can find it by this link : http://forum.unity3d.com//files/nigh...rmodel_165.zip

@ almighty : whaaaaat the?

lol.

ok this took me about 2 hours. but there were alot of things i felt needed changing.. i got alot of advice for you man, but before we start i want you to understand.. this is all about helping you... i would like nothing more than for you to come back in 2 weeks. having used what i have told you here you then return with something uber...

that said. the changed OBJ if you PM me ill send back to you. the same with the photoshop file and the texture i made to do this.

first up.. heres how i got him looking. the tex was REALLY easy to make, i wanted to keep it to something i know you could make with relatively little effort.



as for how.

i changed the geometry to make a little more anatomical sence. something that helped me alot is A drawing skulls from referance.. in plan then when you feel more confident in 3/4 view. then after that making a very basic skull shape and posting it somewhere like here so people can pick out the errors. the human head is a pain in the butt and it will take you a while to master so fear not

the texture was quite simple. after id made the geometric changes i went out looking for male faces on the google image search. came up with something i think most people on here are probably farmilliar with.. the average male face that comes up each time i do that search.. so i used that image quickly put it into photoshop messed with the colour using the Hue/Saturation filter until i had what i wanted. sampled the colour from the cheeks using the dropper tool and painted in ther rest of the area i needed (under the neck and the rest of the jaw) then i added in the rest of the hair.. painted the eye a browny colour and used the dodge tool to get the glow effect

simples!

i think thats about it. your welcome to use the texture i made and the obj i changed to keep going i hope only that you learn from it man i hope at least some of what i said makes sence... good luck man

I don't think the way to teach this guy to paint textures is to teach him how to Google for photographs, Nistrum.
If anything, he just needs to keep on painting, and taking the criticism here to heart.

I'm also wondering how to create believable clothes and stuff for fantasy and sci-fi cahracters

Look at real clothes and make it more exotic...

You are getting a hell of a lot of good feedback here man, but until you start thinking outside of the box and solving problems yourself you arent going to get anywhere.

Most of an artists knowledge has to be inputted into your subconsious because there are too many things to think about when working on a peice that it would become an ugly mess. An artist only gets this subconsious knowledge through applying it.

I know that your only 14 and you have a hell of a long way ahead of yourself yet. This is the perfect age to try and get a good foundation on art, as this stuff will stick in your mind for the rest of your life. I would say focus less on doing finished work and spend more time studying the basics, especally perspective, form and design. Hell im going to even say that its a good idea to ignore anatomy till you have those other things down.

Well anyways im going to post a thread that i have been updating with art since i started to get serious about it, perhaps it might help you.

http://polykarbonbbs.com/showthread.php?t=11326

This may seem abit ridiculous, But i'm only 14 ive been doing this 6 months and i can feel a massive improvement, so if you keep going i'm sure you can too buddy. Just dont jump straight into stuff like modeling and texturing characters. Hell i started of modeling and texturing a wooden crate.
-Good luck man

Haha, I started with a good 'ol vase.

mighty.. no but he clearly needs to start from somewhere. learning skin tones is alot easyer if your doing i from something thats already there. i first learned how to do simple skin tones by copying photos. once id learnt some of how it works i thenmoved onto painting faces for myself.

technically the best thing for you to do is wonder over to conceptart.org and do some of the workshop/mentoring bits so you can get a better feel for skins.. personally as a learning exorsize i would get you to first work on the drawing of the skull and bassic anatomy. for 2 reasons.. reason 1 being it is without a doubt almost 100% vital that you learn it. because sooner or later for work or pleasure you wil want to create a character and anatomy is the only way you will aquire the basic skills you need.

reason 2 is for texturing you NEED basic art skills, and as boring as it may seem. the only way to preogress is to start with the same basic lessons you get in art class.skintones being the last of your problems... while you work on your 2D art skills for organic work.. work on basic mechanical stuff in 3D start off with things that you can reach. a coke can, a monitor a mouse and a CD prefect the art of texturing those along side. i know its not exactly making unreal.. but you gotta walk before you can run