Tank's 3D Sketchbook

[Tank[NL]]

Hello hello, everyone.

it's been a long while since i posted anything here. this last year has been crazy busy.

thankfully i made it into my second year of uni and i've finally god a sculpting class :)

this thread is where i'll be posting my stuff from time to time.

first up, Elisha Beakinski.

a character from, i think, a french comic about a sort of swat unit.

the assignment we have, is to sculpt a comicbook character. she's got cool scars, is fairly unknown and look cool.

so here is what it's based upon and what i've got so far.

let me know what you think and c&c more then welcome :)

[Tank[NL]]

more stuff.

more scars, lots of tweaks and clothing

[lebaje]

try to smooth the cloth, unless you'l add a bump or displace maps.

other than that, look reel nice!

[YEAROFTHEOX]

the ankles definately need some attention, and the hands are enormous, and very flat..

[Tank[NL]]

@lebaje: the cloth is that bumpy because i imported from marvelous designer 2. the whole mesh is this netting of triangles. so it subdivides terribly bad. i'll be rebuilding it to quad towards the end.

@YEAROFTHEOX: hardly paid attention to the ankles yet and non to the hands, so you're right. they suck :)

[Kaiune3D]

The biceps feel a bit off where they connect to the deltoid and forearm. The head looks really good. You may want to add some stretch folds on her shirt where it pulls across the breast.

[Tank[NL]]

the clothes are a basemesh at best. i'll be rebuilding them and then sculpting them, once i have a final pose, etc.

as for the arm, i noticed that and it's been bugging me this whole morning. figured out what's wrong tho :) easy fix :)

thnx for the c&c so far guys, keep it coming :)

[Tank[NL]]

right, i've been working on this quite a bit over the last few weeks.
i cant even begin to count the number of things i've changed :)

so yeah, as always, c&c welcome guys :D

[Tank[NL]]

Hey guys,

i just built my low poly version of this character and rendered out the normalmaps

something odd is happin and i cant fix it. any advice would be hot :)

it looks like my normals are reversing whenever the uv's have a seam :S

[smoke91]

Which application did you use to render the normalmaps?
Also which Shader do you use to display your lowpoly + normalmaps?

This looks like one of the channels of the normalmap is not interpreted correctly.
If you baked the normalmap outside 3DsMax try flipping the Y (green-channel) in Photoshop.

Or check your realtime shader for settings which flip normalmap channels.(Xoliul Shader e.g. has a checkbox for flippin Y)

hope this helps
Otherwise it's lookin good so far!

regards,
smoke

[Tank[NL]]

thanks for the reply. i rendered the normals in max 2012. as for the shader, i'm using a standard material from max.

i'll try flipping the channel, tomorrow. sleep now :)

[Tank[NL]]

right, so flipping the channels or parts of the channels did nothing.

throwing it into maya did... :S

no seams, except where geometry is duplicated. i dont get. could it be an issue with max's render-engine? or perhaps something else? any ideas out there?

i'm confused :)

[McFly]

Close her mouth please. It makes her look like, you know, those inflatable friends people buy when they're lonely. :)

Sorry I can't help you with your issue but your character looks promising. Keep at it!

[Tank[NL]]

mouth needs to be open. we gotta do blend shapes and a facial rig :)

[Tank[NL]]

Hi guys.

i'm on to the first stage of creating the blendshape normalmaps :) basically i need to sculpt a fairly wide range of facial movement so i can have more detailed blendshapes :)

so far, i've made a neutral expression, which was actually involved changing quite a bit. closing the mouth turned up all kinds of problems. the jaw was too long, the skull was too wide and short, etc. had to fix all of that as well.

but for now, i'm pretty happy with how this is progressing :)

let me know what you guys think and if you spot any problems :D

[Tank[NL]]

some more blendshapes :)

[Tank[NL]]

hey guys,

I just finished the low poly version of this project, including the unwrap and some quick normal maps.

have a look and let me know what you think.

[Tank[NL]]

handed in etc :) besides, it's based on a cartoon character, so the head is a bit off, proportion-wise.

and what part of the neck are you referring to and why would it present a problem?

[Tycane3D]

something went wrong with my post, anyways, i'm referring to the cross in the middle of her neck, altho it probably wont show very much if at all...and yea if its already handed in its pointless to give constructive crits i guess :)

Why it would give problems?, chances are that when she bends her head forward it will dent inwards, make a hole and give some unexpected smoothing group issues.

[Neil_F01]

no offence.. but she has man shoulders... (i know pot calling kettle.. i remember a chick i did that had man shoulders)..

[Tank[NL]]

@tycane: right, i see. meh ,we wont have animation again for 6 months, so... :)

@niel: She's a SWAT/Special Forces agent. if she had flimsy little shoulders, she'd be worthless :)

[Neil_F01]

yeah she maybe a swat.. but she would still hold the femanine shape.. believe me.. i'm not being harsh about this.. i heard all this crap before from others... and they were right.. it did need changing.. so that all i'm saying.. drop the shoulders a little and pull them inwards

i would suggest redoing the boobs.. as well they need to drop a little.. and one is always a little bigger than the other.. no boob is the same size..

[Tank[NL]]

i might be able to tweak that before the animation assignment. as for the sculpting class, the deadline was yesterday at 18.00. :)

but dont worry about being harsh man :) without c&c, we'd never advance as artists :)

but i still dont really see what you mean, though. i'll take a look when i have my files again. on my laptop now. laptop does not like mudbox :)

[Tank[NL]]

small update. turns out, i can use this model for my next class :) which is texturing. i'll be transforming her into a proper zombie-apocalypse survivor. you, with bodyarmor, silenced guns, practical clothing. stuff like that ;)

updates later this week.

[Tank[NL]]

right, quick texture progress. lots of errors, bad specularity, but hey, progress :)

[Tank[NL]]

no updates, except for my grade. for some reason i got a 6 out 10 for the sculpts and the low poly version. i'm really confused. i thought i did pretty good. and of course, no teacher feedback yet :S

ugh...

[Neil_F01]

6 out of 10 aint that bad mate.. i wouldnt be too down about that.. i mean we all have to go up that steep curve and it aint easy..

sh1t.. i mean.. well. if i wanted to be constructive i'd try and give ya the teacher feedback on where you missed the four points.. but sadly.. i can be quite hard about things.. (i call my dad drill sergent dad... if you know what i mean.. its just inbuilt.)..

but yeah.. the four missing points

1).. body perportions... (ie. manly shoulders)..
2).. unposed finished
3).. for a low poly model.. 12k tris used... i perhaps would have expected more body attachments.. perhaps a miss use or over use of tris on the actual body
4).. untextured

Hopefuly that helps and isnt too harsh... would love to hear what your actual teacher does say and whether it matches up.. other than that.. looking forward to your next sculpt.. hope too see a new up soon.. :D

[Tank[NL]]

yea, the shoulders i know. it was just too late to fix those. we didnt have to rig the entire model, so that wasnt a criteria.

as for the low poly, it's a little over 12K without anything. so no gun or clothes. we had a 12K limit-ish for just the body. i'll post a full wire later today.

as for textured, that was also not a criteria. hell, we'd get extra grades if we made a normal map.

the only thing i can think of, is that the teacher wasnt happy about the likeness or something. but again, i've seen models that were really truly crappy, that had a lot less detail, crappy low poly etc, that ended up getting a 5, for example.

that's what i mean when i say i dont get. i mean, sure my model is not perfect, i know that. the low poly has a few less than perfect edgeloops etc, but overal i would have expected to get a better grade than barely passing :S

[Ojah]

It looked alright, but teachers usually consider what they think you are able to do and give you a grade based on that.
So it might just be that the teacher thought you could do way better.

I have to say though that you picked an extremely hard character to create, her being a short haired muscular girl, which will easily look like a man if a small error was made.

Now to give you some crits:
- Use real life reference. Comic books often have the proportions of characters change based on what they are doing and skewed perspective to enhance action, so they should be used as a guidline, but not as literal rules.

- The proportions could be improved, shoulders too broad, barely any hips.
- it seems you actually made her boobs smaller, her tanktop does not push them together them like in the comic ref.
- those feet scare me.
- for the face, not enough chin and her chin is way to pointy, eyes too far apart, lips to narrow.
Get more 3/4 view reference for this.
Might be a good exercise to throw away all the front and side views when you got the basic proportions done and keep other views next to your model to get the feeling right.

[Neil_F01]

you know i had never really considered using comic book characters for portions.. that genius... :D