Deer character (Comments, suggestions, etc. welcome)

[NecroBite]

This gives me some weird sort of hope that I can actually do this:

[+] youtubes

I've decided to go with the first one for now (only partly because no one feels like correcting me) and am now finalizing his arm muscles and other details today. Then I get to come up with a fun design for color, although his fur will mostly be based off of a white-tail deer (and those pictures Korban3 linked). The raised areas of the jacket are sown patterns, if anyone was wondering (but I somehow doubt they were).

More news (and potentially WIP screen-shots) to come.

[NecroBite]

A bit of progress:

This is as far as I've gotten in terms of texturing. The colors for the sowing were going to be brighter, but I wanted them to seem like they were actual cloth. And also to appear a bit worn.
It's all still kind of messy right now. These textures might be too dark for Blender (everything seems darker in Blender from Sculptris). ...And I may have forgotten something important.

[Korban3]

That's looking like a really great WIP. Can't wait to see more.

[NecroBite]

So I've gotten as far as making a normal map for my character. The low-poly is about 8.37k, which I think should be low enough. I'm excited. I followed this tutorial to get my map.
Unfortunately, there were a few issues. Some weird stuff happened to the back of his neck, ears, and parts of his belt. I should be able to fix them, though.

[+] deer bake

I think this is fixable.

Deer bake.png (71.09 KiB) Viewed 4512 times

EDIT: If anyone has suggestions on how to fix this, that'd be great. I'm still learning Blender, so... yeah. I will redraw the seams to see if that helps. Or move some of the low-poly's ... well, polies around.
EDIT 2: You should see some of the older versions of this character. They're ugly enough to be the things that hide in closets and give children nightmares.

[Thomason1005]

EDIT: If anyone has suggestions on how to fix this, that'd be great. I'm still learning Blender, so... yeah. I will redraw the seams to see if that helps. Or move some of the low-poly's ... well, polies around.
EDIT 2: You should see some of the older versions of this character. They're ugly enough to be the things that hide in closets and give children nightmares.

gimme those old version gimme nau!
im not sure about the lowpoly thing, are you using a decimate modifier? Also the color map on characters made by aubrey is almost plain white, and theres a palette map which the game uses to color the chars in game with the color picker thingy

[NecroBite]

I think I know what happened... It might've been that I decimated it, then moved it a little before symmetrizing it. Because sometimes I do really stupid things without realizing it. :S
That shouldn't be too hard to fix. Just re-import it, re-decimate it and symmetrize it again.

I'll do that and see if it turns out right this time. And update the starting post with my most current update of the model. And also test how the textures look with the model all white.

EDIT: If I were going to put in a specific fighting style for this guy... Well, how do you guys feel about boxing? Or something else? He seems like he'd use a relatively simple fighting style, tbh. Make use of those gauntlets and whatnot.
EDIT 2: Palette map? I must research this. Sounds like fun. Bright purple and green deer, anyone? ...Or caribou.

[NecroBite]

First post updated with new WIP. Still working on the bake (because I haven't gotten around to figuring out that problem). Will be working on the model for a little while longer before I finalize it (again ).

EDIT: Only minor things left to texture and I'll be okay with progress. Then I can do some detail texturing, hopefully. Fix up this and that, improve the fur texture and whatnot.
EDIT 2: Thought I'd include a shot here for anyone that doesn't feel like checking the starting post:

Wasn't happy with the design on the vest. So I went with another one that was more... minimal, I suppose you could say.
Texture WIP update. :D

[Thomason1005]

Looks really nice, but the specular highlight are a bit irritating

[Endoperez]

There's few different things that could be going wrong.

1) Decimate - remove half - symmetry - depending on how, exactly, the decimation happens to put in triangles, you might have gotten triangles going over the middle line. Then the Symmetry modifier screws up, leaving holes (where a triangle went over and was deleted), or flickering (where triangle wasn't deleted, and crosses over onto itself on the oppoise side).

2) The baking algorithms made a wrong guess. The baking tries to shoot straight rays away from the lowpoly, and considers whether those rays hit the highpoly or not. Sometimes it gets confused, and the ray hits the wrong part of the highpoly (e.g. if there's a highpoly skin and a highpoly skirt, both as separate surfaces), or where it thinks part of the same surface is supposed to be out, part of in. That happens if the lowpoly geometry is mostly inside highpoly, but pokes outside of it in a few parts. When the highpoly is inside the lowpoly, it thinks they're "down" instead of "up" from the surface. It's possible to make several bakes, with the lowpoly moved forward or back, or scaled bigger or smaller, and then combine the good parts from those bakes into one good normalmap. You could also make a duplicate of the lowpoly, and edit it (without changing its UV) so it fits inside the highpoly, then baking the duplicate. The trick is in using the bake from the edited, ugly duplicate in the original, unedited lowpoly - the bake won't be perfect, but an imperfect bake without errors is usually much better than a technically correct bake with errors.

If you post one of the baked texture images here, I can give it a look, I might be able to figure out something. Object-space map would be preferable to Tangent-space, I think it's a bit easier to understand.


Textures are easy to change later. Getting this to work in the game is probably going to be a bigger technical challenge. Have you done any weight painting/skinning? If you want to see this in game, you might want to put some time aside for doing all that technical stuff.

It's looking good! You're doing a nice job.

[NecroBite]

Have you done any weight painting/skinning? If you want to see this in game, you might want to put some time aside for doing all that technical stuff.

Only a little, on one of the older models. It was an automatic weight paint and the results were... less than satisfactory, probably due to the way the cloth is around his legs. I'll have to go in and weight him by hand.

If you post one of the baked texture images here, I can give it a look, I might be able to figure out something. Object-space map would be preferable to Tangent-space, I think it's a bit easier to understand.

I think I have a bake hanging around somewhere... Ah, here we are. I have two from last time. Two because they both came out differently. Sorry that they're both tangent, but it's what I have on hand at the moment.

[+] normals 1 + 2

First normal. First result. Something weird happened, don't know what, but I thought I'd keep it anyways.

Second result. Seems more normal than the last. I can see the issues from here, though. Somethin' funky goin' on.

EDIT: I might try combining different versions of bakes for a better result. Obviously not these ones, though, since they're more or less the same.

[Endoperez]

The heads seems to be clipping into the arm areas. You could try making a separate bake where you bake the highpoly (without head - it's a separate piece right? if it's not, it might be worth a try to make a copy of the HP where you try to remove the head) onto the lowpoly. The rays are hitting shirt inner seam instead of shirt outer seam, or skin instead of shirt, or something like that..

The area in the horizontal center, top, between the two arms, has some inverted areas. The yellow blotches. The highpoly and lowpoly are probably crossing there, so that HP goes inside LP.

[Thomason1005]

There should be sth like a bias setting when baking. You should play around with it and see which value works the best.

you should keep it low, but if you get black areas its too low (if the bias is smaller than the distance to the highpoly)

[Endoperez]

The Bias value in bake settings refers to distance, in Blender units. Depending on your model's scale, value of 1 might already be way too high.

[NecroBite]

Just a small update. I didn't get around to separating the head, but...
There don't really seem to be any other problems than those weird seams. I think this is something I can fix, though. I'm getting back to work on this, although I'm beginning to think I'll have to redo his textures again... Oh well.

Also thought it might be fun to post a concepty sort of thing from back when I was full in the swing of making this char.

[+] Old Concepty Thing

You might recognize it...!

Anatomy's a bit funny, but whatever. (...I think one arm's smaller than the other. )

I had some thoughts about maybe using the dog or wolf rig for it. That's all for now.

[Endoperez]

It's a good concept piece, don't worry.

Anatomy and perspective can never be perfect enough, but then again, you don't need perfection to do something awesome... so don't worry about perfection except when you're practising anatomy specifically. When you're doing concepts and other stuff, worry about it being good enough to fulfill its purpoose. And in this case? It shows what you were going for, and since you were able to model the character... It worked!