I have currently started sculpting and using blender for the last several week and have finished, to some degree, a project fallowing along through CGcookies course to create and render a detailed character.
I am interested in any artistic critiques and am not apposed to suggestions for improvement and also my concerns are of a technical nature regarding the model. If anyone has any info regarding ways and techniques to achieve the same results while reducing poly count and rendering time or lighting effects that would really be appreciated.
This model has a little bit more to go before its finished, as its been rendered with basic textures and shading, also the subdivisions needed to be reduced in order to render in cycles, “out of memory”. so please provide me with any ideas and visions you might have that would knock it out.
Again if you can provide technical details regarding your critiques that would help, as my knowledge of blender is still very basic. Thanks, Chris.
first of all: This guy looks insane! you can see the amount of work that has gone into all the detail and the overall quality is very high. Also I like the extreme proportions. They remind me of blizzard like character designs (the armour too). But: 1. I feel like the feet and lower legs are too big. They are so massive that it feels like he would have trouble to lift them up. 2. Also the toes are less detailed than the rest of the model.
In terms of technical advice: How many polygons are we talking about here? If the memory of your gpu isn’t sufficient you can still render on your cpu. That will use you RAM as memory for the scene. (yeah, it’s slow but you got no choice)
In general you can retopo (overlay the dens mesh with a clean and low rez. mesh) you mesh and bake the detail into a texture. That will make the scene a lot more handleable. But it is a lot of extra work if you just want to show off you model. I recomend using a tool like Retopo Flow from blender market. It makes retopology more convenient in Blender. I’m sure you’ll find some tutorials on displacement baking online.
if you just want to show off the model I would (it’s personal preference) use only one shader for both the armour and the body. And you can improve the presentation a great deal by using slightly colored lighting and a more appealing (but not distracting) background. I believe this tutorial about character lighting is really good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o0PauhFQyo
Please let me know if this was helpful advice and if you have any other questions.
The feet, funny enough are a bit too large and ill shrink them down. The blizzard look was exactly right, I tried to stylize it as much as I could without getting silly. Also in my view port I have under the the view port description “user Ortho” it says “feet” and it enlarges the the portion of the model furthest away like an inverted perspective.
It is in fact retopolgized with retopo flow;) Took forever with all the armor.
