Mech/Cyborg Concept (Looking for constructive criticism)

I will be updating the top post with the most recent progress picture for this project.

The overall concept is a mechanically modified human inside a mech. I’m going for a dark, grimy techno-gothic feel. The font is completely made up and I hope it will lend it the atmosphere I’m going for. I plan to texture and rig this eventually. any criticism is welcome; I’m using this project to get back in the saddle after about a decade away.

Most Recent Image:

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Concept doodle:



Initial renders:



I can see a lot of work, keep going! :slight_smile:

I did some more work on the legs and the faceplate as well as added a proper lighting setup. I’ve used a whole lot of boolean operations so far resulting in a lot of ngons which i’ll have to clean up at some point. That long shape to the rear of the arm is a weapon placeholder. The nest few things I plan to do before rigging/texturing are:

-Finish the feet
-Finish the back portion of the arms
-Finish back of the body
-Add/sculpt face and other details under the faceplate
-Clean up mesh
-Begin adding detailed features from top to bottom.

Attachments




Feet are almost done. Also, I was able to get my render time from about 3:30 to 1:15 by rendering with the GPU using 256x256 tiles. Also, I found the denoising option.



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Really nice hard surface work there. I’d be interested in your rigging technique for this.

I spent most of this week cleaning up the mesh, removing those seams so I can texture them in with normal/bump maps, and recreating some parts that I wasn’t happy with. I liked the way the previous foot turned out, but it was a bit too detailed and didn’t fit in with the rest of the model so I made a new pair of feet. I threw those ‘plates’ in the hip area as a placeholder, but they don’t really look that bad. Not sure i’m happy with the way the waist looks though. I’ve got a few more details to throw into the joints/waist and some hoses/wires to add in the rear. The head is a placeholder from a previous sculpt just to see how the proportions look. After I finish the aforementioned things I’ll start on the details in the ‘cockpit’ area and sculpt a face. Then It’s off to texturing


Thank you for the comments, guys. I messed around with some ideas for rigging the telescopic joints in the shoulder, but I may just have to put off rigging until the end of the project so I can get a final render in a relatively timely manner since I need this for a project.

I made a quick sketch of my concept for the “cockpit” area where the head will go and modified the mesh in Blender to match. Next, I exported a part of the mesh as a .OBJ file so I can use it in Sculptris as a reference for my head model sculpt. In the interest of time I will modify a head model I’ve already completed. Below are the concept sketch and what progress I’ve made on the sculpt. Somehow some of the faces of my mesh were lost during the export, but it will still work as a reference for the sculpt.


I feel that it is lacking something but I’m sure it will come together while sculpting.

Attachments


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Just moved literally across the world to pursue art school. Anyhow, I’ve continued a bit of work on this project. Made a tracing of the render and threw some colors and additional details on it to try to fleshout the final look:

I figured this would go a lot faster if I had completed reference material to go off of, so I made a couple more to help complete the major structural details. So far it’s been way easier having a better vision of the final product to work towards. I would like to work a bit more on the color scheme. My initial vision was something WH40K-ish but with a bit more of an abstract feel. Tan/black doesn’t really get that across.


In this cutaway you can see how the faceplate armor fits to the chassis.


Without the faceplate. The rectangular area below the chin will house some organs.


Some detail in the rear (rocket booster/exhaust)


Concept Drawings.

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Maybe I should wait to have more to show, but meh. I was working on getting PBR materials from Substance Painter to work in Blender, and applied a few sample materials to my upper chassis piece (with HDRI in Cycles):


Looks like it was a success. I have to say… this has become way easier within the past decade.

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Here are a few renders of the final concept coming together. I’m going to have to go back into most of the pieces and convert some n-gons to quads/tris as well as check to make sure the topology is free of weirdness before I feel comfortable exporting it to Substance as a whole. I also think I’ll attempt to rig it prior to texturing to make sure I don’t need to modify anything further.

As always, any constructive criticism is wanted/needed.

Edit:
Here’s a bonus closeup render with that random PBR material applied (Not how it will eventually be textured):

Spent most of my time today redoing most of the mesh on the legs. I replaced the feet with an earlier design and redid the lower and upper legs. Still not 100% happy with the upper leg. Other than possibly fixing that and adding a few more mechanical details in the joints, all I have left to do are a retopo of the face, and add some details in the “cockpit” as well as sculpt some organs for lower area in the cockpit.

Here’s a bit of a pose showing some of the articulation in the model:

Finally went through and fixed a few (a lot) topology errors. The model is 95% complete, aside from the retopo of the head. In the interest of time, I think i’ll leave out the organs I planned on having on display and leave those details for later. I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out so far.

Some major things I did:
-New concept for the shoulder joint mechanics.
-Mechanical details in the knee/elbow.
-Edited a lot of the model for functional details and errors in the mesh from boolean operations.

Monumental tasks ahead:
-Add further details such as wires/cables in exposed mechanical areas.
-Retopo the head.
-UV Unwrap about a million objects (probably like 20-30 manual unwraps and the rest will be
“Smart UV project”-ed)
-Somehow rig this thing
-Export to Substance Painter for texturing.

Here are a few renders:

Man the new joints and hardware to this guy are looking amazing. Great job! I’ve been scouring Pinterest and ArtStation for robot joint construction to help figure out my current robot project. I finally ended up coming up with my own shoulder system. I wanted to do something like your shoulder but couldn’t figure out or plan on how I was going to rig it. When you get that far you’ll have to share your piston/hydrolic rigging experience, and maybe some screenshots?

I definitely will! Doing some research a couple weeks ago, it looks like it may be as “simple” as having the outer cylinders/pistons always orient themselves towards each other (Or rather, at an empty set at either “joint”), and having the center cylinder maintain its position 50% of the way between the two cylinders (if that makes sense.). I will definitely share my experience and the .blend as well.

Very interesting! I saw a video by CG Cookie on rigging a piston (really it looked like a shock absorber on a car), but I wasn’t sure how it would work in a complete rig or complex model. I look forward to hearing more from you!

Today I did a retopography of the original sculpted head. The original has 78k Tris, while the retopo version has 16k tris (or 8k quads). I also baked a normal map. The image below shows the original wireframs/solid shaded head on the left, with the retopo/normal mapped version on the right.

I wish the wireframe node wouldn’t triangulate everything. Oh well.

Edit:
Here is an urendered screenshot comparing them without a normal map.:

Oh, and here is the unsubdivided retopology with only 2k tris (I wonder what it looks like if I bake the normal map onto that):

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Finished the joints. Might add a few more wires/cables later.

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Modeling is 99% done. I just need a few more details in some key areas. And then go over the mesh and organize object names/everything :slightly_frowning_face:

Don’t mind the plastic looking SSS, just wanted to see how the face will interact with the other elements real quick.