This is the end of day one working on my first character model. I’m primarily a hard surface modeler but I decided I need to be able to do organics as well.
This is going to be a survivor type character, with random bits of armor such as mismatched knee pads, misc ammo holding apparatus, maybe a kevlar vest and helmet. Any suggestions in this area are appreciated.
If this mesh doesn’t turn out as well as I would like I think I’ll make it open to the public. If so it will be fully animated as I’ll be using this for testing purposes. Other wise I’ll be adding it into a project I’ve got going as a playable character. Keep in mind though that the animations might look weird as I’m not 100% on where the best place for loop cuts would be.
Mesh Info:
Without subdivide modifiers on the poly count is a little over 2200.
The gas mask is based on a painting mask.
All work is done in Blender 2.49.
Rendering is just basic 3 point lighting.
The mesh has 3 different materials with no textures attached.
If there are any questions I’ll up date this section.
UPDATE:
Got some basic clothes on him. Pollycount is now 2,008. Might start getting some rigging done before I give him more props.
UPDATE:
Finished with the basic form. I am fairly pleased with the end result. Poly count is 1748 without the hat and mask which are both high poly models and mesh deforms well with subsurf on. Now I can start on clothes!
UPDATE:
I completed my second model based on my original head mesh and the poly count is not down to 223 in this image.
UPDATE:
Alright I lied. I stopped for a while but found some free time and kept working so here’s what I’ve got so far.
Thanks for taking a look and Check back. There’s more to come.
post wire-frame without sub-D and i can give you crits. looks good tho, but i am not able to tell you if it would be good for games untill i see the wireframe (and 2200 polys is really high in my opinion if it will NOT be the main char )
Thanks for the reply. I’ll be sure to get a wireframe up there when I upload my next renders although I’m not too concerned about that as I usually rebuild my mesh two or three times using the previous one as a template allowing for better optimization. For that reason I use subsurf modifiers a lot and extra edge loops that don’t really need to be there on the first mesh. When mesh is finished I’m estimating about 15,000 polys for the entire character.
15,000 polys? Yeah… you may want to optimize that. A lot.
Look, even if it does look beautiful, and runs in the scene quite well by itself, there’s no way the environment or supporting characters will be able to look equally good without breaking your scene.
Umm. If your going to try and import it into unity 3D. I dont think it will work. I have the free version still not unity 3. And I can only import up to 6,000 polys. is there any way to change that?
@Wade: I always just break my meshes up into multiple parts. In blender you can attach separate meshes to the same animation rig.
@Screenhog: I know all about poly counts and optimization. When contracting as a freelance artist I am most often requested to make environments, so a character with almost as many poly’s as a scene is a problem I know but as I am just trying to teach myself I don’t feel that going overboard to make it look decent is really a bad thing. After this first model I will start to work backward to optimize my work flow.
I probably should refine what I’m looking for in this. I would like to hear your ideas about cosmetics more then technical stuff. I know all about the technical aspect of modeling and have more then 6 years of experience working in the 3D game industry. Not anything all that special, mostly just personal stuff and things for friends but have more then enough experience to know the limits of modern games are. So please no more about the poly count.
exactly. best one to test the shape of your model is a plain material (blue maybe) and render the model in front of a black backround without any shading and you will see the hard edges.
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is there any way to change that?
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