first/old character

[Sir-Knight]

okay, this model is from 2-3 years ago from my last attempt at learning max (then max6) almost uninstructed.

I did my best with tutorials but in the end there were just too many questions and frustrations with no answers especially in rigging. So I recently started up 3d again in house for my work to be productive in my downtime.

I'm looking for critiques and some in depth explanation of what I did wrong or what I can do better. This model for all intents and purposes is considered finished, if I'm going to fix anything it will be in a redo. Some topography issues may be present as I was using a toon shader at the time, so now without the toonshader, the coloring/texturing will be kinda odd.

Also I almost had it completely rigged (albeit crappily) until I dropped the mobile hard drive I had it stored on. I was able to recover the mesh of some of the stuff I was working on, lost a few props, lost the rig, lost the facial morph targets I had started to work on...

Started out with this character:



ended up with this (fairly high res) btw, I've got a separate wireframe render overlayed on top of a normal render... is there a better way to show wireframe on a textured model?

close up of the face mesh I had a heck of a time trying to figure out a way to do hair the way I wanted it, and even in the end, I didn't end up with something I was satisfied with, and couldn't find any tutorials on a way that I wanted. Would the better solution have been to extrude it off the head? Or model it separate from a patch or plane and attach it as an element?

my interpretation of overlapping clothing over jointsThis was one of my main questions... if 2 types of clothing overlap each other, how does one model it? In this case for the shoulder pads and every seam that met with a different surface (clothing layers, skin) I extruded the faces inwards, shrank the edge loop and extruded it back out... I wasn't sure if that was the right way to do it, but seemed like a good idea at the time.

here's a link to the gallery of the remains of all the stuff I was working. Lost the file for the psg1 and the long version of the g36 before I could even texture them.

I've since gone back and played with trying to reduce the number of polys and cleaning it up so the mesh shown here and the mesh shown in the gallery will have some slight differences, however I think at this point it's just as good an idea to start over with all the knowledge that I gained from this attempt and a few others since then.

Anyway, I'll leave it at that, feel free to dig into it, I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts.

[Bigley]

um... well I am confused at what you want...
Is this the intro of you saying you are going to redo the model? Or do you want us to crit the old one?

I will answer your direct questions though...

As for the wire and texture shots... I would just do a screen grab for the wire and a seperate render for texture. It besomes difficult to look at both when they are together.

It is better to model hair seperately...

For the clothes... it looks like the vest is seperate from the shirt. model the vest seperate. (the shoulder pads are apart of the vest)

[Sir-Knight]

I will probably redo it eventually incorporating the things I know now about better edgelooping and more economical modeling practices, but yes, critique away at the old model, I need to know where to go from there.

Actually none of the clothing is modeled separately, as that was a question I had that went unanswered (best to model separate clothing or extrude off the nude figure which is what I chose) and if modeled separately, would the faces that sit against the faces of the figure need to be 2 sided?

[Sir-Knight]

*sigh* since nobody has stepped up with anything, I've just been going about it in the way I think I should do it, which could be wrong, but whatever, that's life.

So I've been working on this and fishing it around mostly in the WIP head thread, and figured I'd give an update as to where I went with this.

went with an entirely new head as the more I tried to fix the old one, the less it actually went anywhere.




I experimented with hairs made with planes and patches and tried generating hair with the shag plugin, I wasn't too pleased with the shag results... in fact they were downright ugly.

I temporarily grabbed a texture to test with from Ben Mathis' hair tutorial (www.poopinmymouth.com) his site is amazing, if he ever puts out a max training dvd, go support it.




Added more planes in to detail the hair:


So at this point, if you've found the wireframe for the old head and hair, the total polycount for the original model was ridiculous... 11138 with 4513 of those just in the hair cause I messed up in the original model in hitting one too many things in one of the rollouts going from I think nurbs into polys.

The new poly count: 4252. 502 for hair. I also decided to cut out a lot of tucks and extra loops in the geometry to simplify it. I was going towards importing it into a game or two to learn the workflow so a lot of that stuff wouldn't be needed. I also remodeled her gun holsters and hands. I also added back in the baubles attached to her vest.



Unwrapped the model with just max and unwrap tools found on ben mathis' site. It's just a better interface for the max unwrapper.

I quickly threw a texture together to test the stretching of the unwrap but decided that once it was mostly there, I'd try importing it into Unreal Tournament 2003.

So I followed the 3dtotal tutorial and using my limited knowledge of physique, I rigged it to an existing biped from the game and imported it.

I accidentally saved the texture psd with a motionblur on the entire hair layer, so the hair textures are all mangled, but it's still okay... it's temporary. So far this was the only real issue with the unwrap.



and the front


So after a few hours of trying to figure out unrealed, I got the model into the game:












The process up to now from picking up the model again and to where it is now was fun, but a huge pain in the ass at times, especially with rig testing hand meshes while I tried to figure out the best way to do them.

Future plans are to take this same model and learning to properly rig, and after that, animation testing. After that... maybe a new character model and normal mapping for UT3 or HL2 or Q4.