FMP Dev Diary 04: Post Mortem

Knight

Things that went well

• Filigree was a nice touch that lots of people pointed out as being a good aspect of the character

• Achieved the dark souls style I was going for

• Character narrative reads well

• Material break ups were well balanced

• Marmoset scene helped sell the context well

• Areas of rest/detail and value break ups

Things that went bad

• Material definition was not strong at all. Metals didn’t look like metals

• Combination of character and organic stuff should have been more fluid. Foliage should have been integrated into the design of the character more

• Colours for clothing were quite samey and boring

• Feathers don’t look great.

• Tree branch looks terrible

• Pose was boring

• The straps and there attachment to the armour is unrealistic and doesn’t work very well

• They didn’t take the armour design in to consideration much

• Texturing could be a little more creative – looks fairly samey throughout, should have had areas where dirt has built up and cleaner areas

• Should have done a final pass of detail on the sculpt before baking – do as much as possible in the sculpt before moving on

• Additional props for the body would have been nice

• Was quite high poly

What I learnt

• Importance of areas of rest and detail

• Importance of nailing the blockout for a solid shape and silhouette before moving on to further levels of detail

• Things need to have a context and reason behind them, additions of random pieces doesn’t necessarily aid the design and can make it quite cluttered.

• Thinking of story and context to character before starting is very important

• Figuring out what fabric you want to make before going in to Marvelous is important

• Straps make things look cool

• Small additions to presentation can make a big difference.

• Doing as much as of the work in zbrush before moving on to the low poly, eg rips/tears etc.

• How to use insert mesh brushes smartly and efficiently

Dorothy

Things that went well

• Hair bake and shader. Was time consuming but worth it

• Face – women’s faces are hard and this one had it’s own set of challenges to it but I think I pulled it off well

• Good back and forth with concept artist

• Stuck to the concept pretty closely

• Upper half of pose looks cool

• Pattern of leg panels looks okay

• Facial Expression is subtle but works well

Things that went bad

• Stubbornness. Towards certain tasks that would have took up my time.

• Project took way too long

• Hard surface stuff was a mess, not modelled or sculpted properly and I was quite lazy with it dues to time constraints

• Material definition of legs is weird and looks completely off

• Bottom half of pose doesn’t look very elegant. She looks like she’s squatting.

• Feet look goofy

• Stubbornness led to me not making the best decisions about how to texture properly to get the best results. E.g. decals looking boring and messy

• Can’t get the hair to look good in engine

• Not much thought put into how the disc works and how it attaches to the body

• Should have spent more time considering hair style and getting ref before placing cards etc. I was left with a really random and unclear style of hair

• Final Marmoset scene didn’t get the attention it deserves and therefore looks quite boring.

What I learnt

• Polypainting is the best way to get good looking realistic skin, especially for faces

• How not to model hard surface stuff

• Importance of constant feedback with the concept artist when it comes to professional practice briefs like this

• Keeping the amount of separate meshes to a minimum to avoid clipping when rigging and animating.

• That stylised work still follows a strict set of guidelines, particularly for anatomy, and its not as simple as making the eyes bigger, etc.

• Anatomical proportions are so much more important than

• Theres good reason for why character artists allocate a lot of geometry for the face.

• Eyes are super important

• You need to follow real world guidelines for PBR materials unless you’re doing really stylised stuff.

Hockey Player

Things that went well

• Clothing was reasonably successful

• Finally did hard surface properly

• Acheieved the style I set out for to some extent – the graphical nature of the Dirty bomb characters

• Material definition was a step above previous characters and is definitely moving in the right direction. – particularly looks nice on the Gilet

• Face went along a lot more smoothly than the last project – I was able to apply what I learnt from Dorothy and speed up the process considerably.

• Lighting of the scene

• Eyes are cool, I’m glad I took the time to make eyes the proper way

• Sweat drips were a nice touch imo

• Was well budgeted compared to the other characters which were nearly 50k tris

• I kept time wasting to a minimum and worked smart rather than fast

Things that went bad

• Don’t think I hit the mark in terms of era/style/iconography.

• Even after the iterations and changing the design I’m still not happy with the legs, should have probably tried to find more real world ref

• Dirt is very uniformly distributed and looks very unnatural

• Should have put more detail into the arm texture and sculpted a more detailed hand. The hand area barley even looks like anything’s been bakes onto it

• Textures went really weird around some areas of the denim and I didn’t fix it

• Pose looks stupid from certain angles, particularly from the side

• Distortion from the pose looks really bad under the armpit areas, didn’t really consider it much when I was making the a-posed character but I neglected that area quite a bit

• Legs are too low poly comparatively to the rest of the model

• Should have really considered the thickness of the low poly clothing more

• Skin texturing is still nowhere near how good I would want it to be. Arms in particular look very plastic and lacking detail/variation

• Probably went overboard on coloured lights in this scene

• Why oh why didn’t I bother doing proper wheels etc for the character. It’s the only thing on the character I didn’t make a high poly for and it really lets it down if you look at the feel

• Because of its similarities to the Dorothy character it doesn’t really look like I explored 3 different styles, and instead looks like I’ve done 2 confusing sci fi characters and then a fantasy knight

What I learnt

• I should probably start polypainting as much of the model as possible as I have much more control over the base colour that way

• Baking in substance painter is dank and saves loads of time

• How to model hard surface things properly and how to bake them properly too

• Reiterating again the importance of clear ref – it’s very easy to forget this one

• I really need to have a clearer idea in my head before giving a design the go ahead – I started this project before really knowing what I actually wanted, and this was probably the biggest mistake of my whole FMP