Sunday 28 August 2011

Head and sword models, digital paintings

I've learned lot about character modelling this week making this head. The hair is not finished at all, this was just to practise sculting and retopologising. I've got some very useful feedback from peers on my course about how I could bring more subtlety to the features. I need to learn a better rendering software to show off my textures, and overlaying a photograph at an early stage of the sculpt will help me understand facial features and proportions better.


This was a one day project. I made the master sword as low polygon as possible with a small texture size. I wanted the normal map to have all of the detail and the diffuse to be very simple, but now I understand this is too simple. You should ne'er have a flat colour anywhere on your diffuse. Last time this willl ever happen!


This is a painting from life, taking around 45 minutes. I found the foreshortening very difficult, and getting the likeness of people in such a short time is tough work! I plan to do more of these next week.


Quick speed paint, about 45 minutes. I'll ttry to do an environment paint a week as it's definitely one of my weak points.

Next week:
Model another game ready head with good textures,
Start working on a female body mesh,
More life painting,
One more environment painting (digital or watercolour)
Mid polygon model of a tree.

2 comments:

  1. Laura your texturing needs more love. The sword model is nice but the texturing is letting it down big time. It looks as it has nearly no textures on and the diffuse doesen't represent the materials at all. Spend a little bit more time on texturing always. As Mike or Chris said in our first year. "You can have a great model and bad textures and it will still look bad but if you have a crap model and awesome textures it will always look better " ... or something simmilar to this.
    Also I would like to point out your rendering method. It doesen't do any good to your models. It does not show any of your normal maps in their full potential. Remeber its through renders you sell your work. Research a bit on how to set up a 2 or 3 point light system in 3ds max with enchanced normal maps.
    Hope you won't be put off by harsh critique :)
    You're doing awesome work. Keep it up :)

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  2. Thanks very much Bart! It's exactly the kind of critique I need :) I'm looking at viewport shaders and lighting set ups in Max, but I definitely need to practice texturing. Thanks again

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