Success! Likeness achieved! :P Third image in my Google search.
With regard to the sculpt, I haven't actually thought things through very thoroughly. I imagined she'd had some super traumatic near-fatal experience happen to her in her past. It drove her kind of insane, while also making her pretty careless, hedonistic and violent. I think if you met her as part of the game, one of the arcs in the story would be making sense of her mental/emotional state and helping her to find peace, or, at least, moments of lucidity. I'm hoping to find the time to rig up her face so I can do some facial expressions that, hopefully, get that bit across too. Although if I don't get any of that across at all but it looks awesome, I still succeed. :P
After a few sketches and another look at the timeline I'd set out for myself for getting this done (and noticing I was behind) I couldn't do stuff that was suggested. Oh well, still looks cool, so I'm not going to beat myself up about it. I wanted to rig and animate her too, just because I can, and so I could say I did, but as things stand I probably won't have the time for that either, so I've asked a colleague to help me with that.
I wish I had a time machine.
Retopologised her recently. This is way too high for mobile, but I'll be using shaders and stuff that don't run on mobile anyway, so aiming way higher end. Also, as long as the topo flow is decent, you can kinda just go through and collapse rings, so if it had to be lower, it's mostly no big deal. Afaik, ME2 characters were ~17k tris, Uncharted3 characters were ~30k tris. This one's currently sitting on a little under 21k, although I'll be adding some hair strips still. 12k verts at the moment, but that'll jump up when I unwrap.
And this is pretty much the sculpt I'm going with. I don't think they look like knickers any more. :P There's some stuff missing (specifically hair-related), but those are way easier to do on the lowpoly imo, so sculpting them in is a bit of a waste. Doing the UVs next, and then I'm onto baking.
Still early texture work, as I've only picked base colours, painted the face, shirt and corset so far, although I've applied some of the stuff that came out of my bakes. Progress feels good! Also still going to add hair strips.
Are those scars on her eyebrow and cheek? I like those details :)
Here're some personal opinions: The tiny hat seems a smidgen too tiny, almost funny, not sure if that's what you're going for since she's a scarred character.
As for knickers - the laced edge makes me feel like they're still old-school knickers - I feel that modeling them more towards hotpants (more contemporary) may get it out of perception that they're undies. Or bloomers, to be technically correct.
The bow behind her (and on her stockings) has a funny shape? They don't look like real bows, which should be a ribbon that folds back on itself, etc? Just thought that with all the other nice details it's a bit amiss that the bows aren't "real" bows.
Something about the colour palette seems a bit disparate, with the accent colours not trimming enough elements off. I feel that the extremities (hands and feet, or arms and legs, but mostly arms) should maybe share a bit more of the trim colours. The colour scheme distribution seems uneven... But maybe that's just me!
Congrats and looking forward to more ass kicking from you! :)
Been writing some semi-exotic shaders to use in a portfolio. This one's a GameBoy shader that I saw someone doing in Unreal on a polycount hangout. It was too cool, and I had to give it a go myself! :D
@Duvo: The girl's a 3D model. Chuck Norris is a photo. Also got a sphere and some particle effects (although those aren't animating there) and a moving light, just to play with how this'd look with different input images. :) This has some great potential applications I think. :) Got a few more, but working on some prettier art to show them off better.
Aweh! Well drawn! As far as the design goes, it seams as though her equipment is kinda alien / demon / death orientated, but her armour is like leather and cloth. Maybe try follow some of those angular like shardy designs into her armour ? maybe some more skulls (apart from the ones in her hair) skull bra or something :P shrug (watching for next update)
Thanks! :) I'll play around and see. It's a redesign of an existing character: Irelia from League of Legends, as a self-imposed art test. Basically, she's from Ionia, which is pretty much their lore's equivalent of our Far East (hence Asian-inspired clothing), but she gained the power to levitate blades after being cursed with some kind of necromancy. I don't know how that works. <_<
I commend your attempt to represent a female LoL champion without Excessive Cleavage™ and a mostly functional spine. Yay!
Her neck angle feels a little pronounced, maybe tilting her head back would make that necromancy thing feel more epic. Also, Irelia does those terrifying dash attacks, you could easily be capturing her either about to, or just having finished one of those hover-dashes, which would be beyond awesome. Especially if you put smoke clouds and an eviscerated hero in soft focus in the background ;)
faster faster :D! Edit: (actually i love those colours :D Maybe red and cyan / yellow? IM SO FRIKKEN EXCITED FOR UPDATES ! :D
PS Also what will help when painting colours is choose a background colour (painting on grey is a bad habit and usually only good for linework or straight up concepts, this feels like you are leaning more towards an illustration), so you can play with shadows that work towards your background rather than just having your red jst go dark red (which is a result of having a no colour background).
Also its hard designing armour in such a forced perspective, maybe jst run through some not so dramatic sketches first before commiting to something like this ?
Looking at doing some fx stuff this week and leaving the background pretty plain.
I'll be in Cape Town all of next week (looking for apartments and stuff; looking at moving down later this year to be closer to my girlfriend), and then doing a rigging course with Judd, and also linear algebra one (because I've forgotten all of that stuff from university, and they taught it pretty terribly), which I hope will make me a stronger tech artist (better rigger, better at doing shader fx). So yeah, looking at finishing her up this week and putting her up on the LoL reddit, or their forums, or something, and getting back to the 3D after a few months if I still like it.
-- Also wrote a little tool for offsetting selected UVs by 1 tile; something pretty useful for games, but not particularly useful for offline rendering, and not properly included in XSI. I spent hours upon hours reading their retarded documentation to get it right. I'm starting to think learning to script for XSI just isn't worth the effort, considering the painful barrier to entry (horrible docs, imo) and its not being nearly as widely used.
Been learning a bit of Blender too, because some friends on polycount recommended it over the stuff I was planning to learn. It used to be such a pain to use... and now, it's just... different. And impressively powerful. And has amazing community support. And gets bugs fixed in a matter of days. And it's much easier to script for.
The thing that keeps jumping out at me now is that you've got rim lighting going on, but it's not a creepy green. Feels like the glowy hoverblades aren't really glowing too much... I think I'm just seeing that as a pattern in the newer LoL character art: They use rim lighting like crazy to lift things off the background.
Yeah. Looks as if I've found the perfect place. Holding thumbs that we can get it, and that when we go view it we don't get any nasty surprises. And that I'll have access to fast, stable internet. <_< Pity I missed the community meetup by a week.
-- I put the wip up on reddit. The topic peaked at #27 on the hottest topics in the League of Legends subreddit, and got the image viewed almost 7,000 times in 24 hours. I got some pretty useful feedback too, as well as offering the community a way to give their input on the painting in the form of which champ they'd like to see slain at her feet.
Tonight I fixed the bottom left blade's angle (the foreshortening was ambiguous), and took out the glows, which I felt were overpowering.
Going to finish it off in the next evening or two I think. Polish up a dead Teemo and/or Talon, and paint some lighting and fx.
Nice Rig. A heads up if you are using blend-shapes to drive deformation, just watch out for the axis of the arm that drives the blendshape. A big pitfall for blend-shape driven body rigs is due to the axis of the bone changing, and when the fold should occur it evaluated incorrectly, and alot of popping with body blendshapes.
Depending on if you are rigging for games or cinematics, I would suggest looking into a muscle system, or just some active deformers.
Thanks! Nah, didn't use blend shapes in the stuff I posted. I did use them in something else to experiment, and used cvShapeInverter to help with bone rotations, but I didn't look into it seriously because at the time Unity didn't import blend shapes by default.
Been a pretty crazy day. Moved offices! (Luma Arcade's moved out of Luma Animation's offices, and we're now in Rosebank.) Handed in some important work and got some super positive feedback. Exhausted.
Here are some works in progress that I started tonight to celebrate the end of stress-crunch-happy-times. Lots of mistakes all over the place, but I'm excited to finish them. ^_^
Wow , nice work, great anatomy studies, I have seen that guy on another forum, probly on zbc or cghub (R.I.P), warms my heart a bit now, knowing its local.
The guy on the first page with the spear, didnt see there was a 2nd page until I posted the comment, as for your steampunk girl, also really well done , solid topology, did you use remesher or zphere topology?
Oh, the guy with the spear was using reference provided by Scott Eaton in his figure sculpting course. So you'd probably see that around quite lot, from students who took his course. :)
I used Max's retopo tools, but I wouldn't recommend them or anything. It's just personal preference and whatever you feel comfortable/efficient using. I wouldn't use an auto-mesher though, unless it gave predictable results. Doing it myself usually leads to needing less geometry and fewer problems later on. An example is ZRemesher, which sometimes gives spiralling topology. It's nice and even, which makes it good for sculpting, but because it spirals it makes it really difficult to select some loops/rings for doing UVs or weights for rigging. (i.e. in some cases, selecting a loop doesn't select a clean contour, but rather spirals all the way up and down a limb.) I hope that makes sense.
Oh, I didnt realise it was Scott Eaton's model, my apologies, still my opinion stays the same : ), good work and topo I used the the older topology method in zbrush,as for the spiralling topology its strange for all the praise zremesher gets, I guess it's ok for static meshes then.Thanks
@Elyaradine - I always get so jealous when I see talent like this. Amazing stuff. Would love to see some of the doodles you do (while on the phone, in a boring lecture or busy with some other mundane task).
@FanieG: Eh. While I'm not great, I think that any "talent" I've got comes from years of drawing, which grew partly from my parents telling me my drawings were beautiful when they looked like crap, which encouraged me to draw even more... :P
Lately, I've been pretty inspired by a friend who's joined us at work as a concept artist. I've also been taking a mentorship with Xia Taptara, who used to work at ArenaNet as a concept artist on the Guild Wars franchise. I've been doing lots and lots of studies, studying the work of a couple of master painters (particularly Frazetta and Sargent), to studying screenshots from movies and games.
Wow, just wow... I can see the Guild Wars influences coming through as well. Very impressive art. It's great that talents like you are involved in our local games industry :)
Comments
With regard to the sculpt, I haven't actually thought things through very thoroughly. I imagined she'd had some super traumatic near-fatal experience happen to her in her past. It drove her kind of insane, while also making her pretty careless, hedonistic and violent. I think if you met her as part of the game, one of the arcs in the story would be making sense of her mental/emotional state and helping her to find peace, or, at least, moments of lucidity. I'm hoping to find the time to rig up her face so I can do some facial expressions that, hopefully, get that bit across too. Although if I don't get any of that across at all but it looks awesome, I still succeed. :P
DAMNIT IT'S A CLICHE. Hahaha!
I wish I had a time machine.
Retopologised her recently. This is way too high for mobile, but I'll be using shaders and stuff that don't run on mobile anyway, so aiming way higher end. Also, as long as the topo flow is decent, you can kinda just go through and collapse rings, so if it had to be lower, it's mostly no big deal. Afaik, ME2 characters were ~17k tris, Uncharted3 characters were ~30k tris. This one's currently sitting on a little under 21k, although I'll be adding some hair strips still. 12k verts at the moment, but that'll jump up when I unwrap.
And this is pretty much the sculpt I'm going with. I don't think they look like knickers any more. :P There's some stuff missing (specifically hair-related), but those are way easier to do on the lowpoly imo, so sculpting them in is a bit of a waste. Doing the UVs next, and then I'm onto baking.
Are those scars on her eyebrow and cheek? I like those details :)
Here're some personal opinions: The tiny hat seems a smidgen too tiny, almost funny, not sure if that's what you're going for since she's a scarred character.
As for knickers - the laced edge makes me feel like they're still old-school knickers - I feel that modeling them more towards hotpants (more contemporary) may get it out of perception that they're undies. Or bloomers, to be technically correct.
The bow behind her (and on her stockings) has a funny shape? They don't look like real bows, which should be a ribbon that folds back on itself, etc? Just thought that with all the other nice details it's a bit amiss that the bows aren't "real" bows.
Something about the colour palette seems a bit disparate, with the accent colours not trimming enough elements off. I feel that the extremities (hands and feet, or arms and legs, but mostly arms) should maybe share a bit more of the trim colours. The colour scheme distribution seems uneven... But maybe that's just me!
Congrats and looking forward to more ass kicking from you! :)
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/9847316/style.mp4 (~1.7MB)
Video (1.56MB)
Well done :)
@Duvo: The girl's a 3D model. Chuck Norris is a photo. Also got a sphere and some particle effects (although those aren't animating there) and a moving light, just to play with how this'd look with different input images. :) This has some great potential applications I think. :) Got a few more, but working on some prettier art to show them off better.
Her neck angle feels a little pronounced, maybe tilting her head back would make that necromancy thing feel more epic. Also, Irelia does those terrifying dash attacks, you could easily be capturing her either about to, or just having finished one of those hover-dashes, which would be beyond awesome. Especially if you put smoke clouds and an eviscerated hero in soft focus in the background ;)
...but I wasn't really happy with them, so I stripped the colour out to play with value instead.
Referencing Zeronis's and Katie de Sousa's (i.e. Riot Games artists) ridiculous work, trying to get it similar in quality and style.
I don't know why I'm trying to get my illustration to their level, as that's hardly my speciality... but whatever; I'm having fun. :P
PS Also what will help when painting colours is choose a background colour (painting on grey is a bad habit and usually only good for linework or straight up concepts, this feels like you are leaning more towards an illustration), so you can play with shadows that work towards your background rather than just having your red jst go dark red (which is a result of having a no colour background).
Also its hard designing armour in such a forced perspective, maybe jst run through some not so dramatic sketches first before commiting to something like this ?
keep it up yo.
Looking at doing some fx stuff this week and leaving the background pretty plain.
I'll be in Cape Town all of next week (looking for apartments and stuff; looking at moving down later this year to be closer to my girlfriend), and then doing a rigging course with Judd, and also linear algebra one (because I've forgotten all of that stuff from university, and they taught it pretty terribly), which I hope will make me a stronger tech artist (better rigger, better at doing shader fx). So yeah, looking at finishing her up this week and putting her up on the LoL reddit, or their forums, or something, and getting back to the 3D after a few months if I still like it.
--
Also wrote a little tool for offsetting selected UVs by 1 tile; something pretty useful for games, but not particularly useful for offline rendering, and not properly included in XSI. I spent hours upon hours reading their retarded documentation to get it right. I'm starting to think learning to script for XSI just isn't worth the effort, considering the painful barrier to entry (horrible docs, imo) and its not being nearly as widely used.
Been learning a bit of Blender too, because some friends on polycount recommended it over the stuff I was planning to learn. It used to be such a pain to use... and now, it's just... different. And impressively powerful. And has amazing community support. And gets bugs fixed in a matter of days. And it's much easier to script for.
Also, you're coming to Cape Town? Woot!
Yeah. Looks as if I've found the perfect place. Holding thumbs that we can get it, and that when we go view it we don't get any nasty surprises. And that I'll have access to fast, stable internet. <_< Pity I missed the community meetup by a week.
--
I put the wip up on reddit. The topic peaked at #27 on the hottest topics in the League of Legends subreddit, and got the image viewed almost 7,000 times in 24 hours. I got some pretty useful feedback too, as well as offering the community a way to give their input on the painting in the form of which champ they'd like to see slain at her feet.
Tonight I fixed the bottom left blade's angle (the foreshortening was ambiguous), and took out the glows, which I felt were overpowering.
Going to finish it off in the next evening or two I think. Polish up a dead Teemo and/or Talon, and paint some lighting and fx.
YOU HEARTLESS MONSTER!
Been dealing with personal issues and online classes the past couple of weeks, but keen to finish this baby off!
Full res (A4@300dpi) here: http://elyaradine.deviantart.com/art/Irelia-League-of-Legends-398329302
Work in progress gif: http://elyaradine.tumblr.com/post/60388094704/teemo-deserved-it-im-sure
reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1ltcvs/irelia_illustration_spoiler_teemo_dies/
Video with a lot more work done:
http://elyaradine.tumblr.com/post/61843262121/some-more-arm-rigging-tests
Depending on if you are rigging for games or cinematics, I would suggest looking into a muscle system, or just some active deformers.
Here are some works in progress that I started tonight to celebrate the end of stress-crunch-happy-times. Lots of mistakes all over the place, but I'm excited to finish them. ^_^
It's still very rough, but this is an idea of the direction I'm heading toward. I need some Dawid Strauss magic in there...
But Easter weekend was productive!
or cghub (R.I.P), warms my heart a bit now, knowing its local.
I used Max's retopo tools, but I wouldn't recommend them or anything. It's just personal preference and whatever you feel comfortable/efficient using. I wouldn't use an auto-mesher though, unless it gave predictable results. Doing it myself usually leads to needing less geometry and fewer problems later on. An example is ZRemesher, which sometimes gives spiralling topology. It's nice and even, which makes it good for sculpting, but because it spirals it makes it really difficult to select some loops/rings for doing UVs or weights for rigging. (i.e. in some cases, selecting a loop doesn't select a clean contour, but rather spirals all the way up and down a limb.) I hope that makes sense.
I used the the older topology method in zbrush,as for the spiralling topology its strange for all the praise zremesher gets, I guess it's ok for static meshes then.Thanks
@watson: Yep! Any time!
@FanieG: Eh. While I'm not great, I think that any "talent" I've got comes from years of drawing, which grew partly from my parents telling me my drawings were beautiful when they looked like crap, which encouraged me to draw even more... :P
Lately, I've been pretty inspired by a friend who's joined us at work as a concept artist. I've also been taking a mentorship with Xia Taptara, who used to work at ArenaNet as a concept artist on the Guild Wars franchise. I've been doing lots and lots of studies, studying the work of a couple of master painters (particularly Frazetta and Sargent), to studying screenshots from movies and games.
TWO WEEKS' ART DUMP, ENGAGE!