animals project

[softocean]

Hi everyone,

Trying to improve through practice, I started an animals project for eventual rigging, animation and exporting to a game engine.

I'm trying to keep the polycount below 500 tris and trying to do a lot with texture maps and image manipulation.

Here are my first five:

a grizzly bear:






cat:

[softocean]

here are a few more:

white tailed deer:






dog:






bald eagle:

[madmenno]

Hi, i like the bird the most, but making an alpha channel for it would make it realy great.

Theres something weird with the cat though... but can't see what. And the dear looks a bit shiny, especially in the side shot.

Anyway good job!

[defaultalias]

softocean, in all the texture work i've seen by you, it's all photosourced. try hand-painting a texture all the way through, you'll have a lot more control.

on all of the models, cat and dog especially, you need to check your anatomy. right now it looks like you traced the side profile of each and extruded it outward.

[bb0x]

There isn't anything wrong with photosourcing a texture, but you should know how to do it properly. I mean the shadows of the fur in the leg behind of the bear. You got specualr in the shadows...how? you should or 1 leave the specular out or make a specualr map and remove the specular in those shadows.

[softocean]

madmenno:
I actually have an alpha channel in the bird, which looks okay in the view panel but it shows up poorly in the render.. any ideas on this?
The cat seems to have some weirdness going on with the position of the eyes.. I'll see what I can do about fixing this. I even tried using a feather and copied it several times to create the wings.

bbox:
thanks for catching the issue with the highlights in the shadow areas.. I guess I need a specular map to fix this...


default alias:
thanks for the tips, I'll try to revisit the anatomy in the front and top views for these characters. I was trying to push the painting in the cat with referenced fur values... I guess it looks too photoshoped... perhaps my next bunch will look better.

thanks for your comments everyone

[softocean]

I've made an update to the cat model to try to address some of the face distortion problems.






oh yeah, added some rigging and animation as well:
http://forums.3dtotal.com/showthread.php?t=53080

[defaultalias]

the animation is ok, but the texture and model still aren't working. in any view other than the side, it only vaguely looks like a cat. so if you're working strictly in the orthographic views, i suggest you switch to using the perspective view. and if you're going to use a photo sourced texture, you need to edit it significantly. could you post the texture so i can see exactly how you did it?

[Kalango]

overall geometry looks nice and solid man, have only two crits...:
-the dog jawl....well...it is odd and way too "circular"
-the photo textures dont work well...try to use the photos as a reference when you are actualy going to paint the textures....

[softocean]

defaultalias:

I uploaded a copy of the cat texture file for your viewing pleasure
I was basically trying to create a dithered cat color over clone stamped texture areas:

http://jerryartist.com/sketches/3dpr...t_texture1.psd

Kalango:
Hmm, I guess I'll take another look at the dog jowles - maybe the mouth goes too far back in general?