Cartoonish Lowpoly Female Seahorse

[cerfribar]

Hello and welcome to this Thread
I am currently working on a Lowpoly Seahorse (between 1.000-1.500 Poly). She is going to be used for a mobile game produced with the unity engine. First things i want to mention is that the models only use Diffuse Color on a 256px Texture. There will be no Normal Map or even transparent Textures used for any model.

EDIT
i messed up the text an pictures in the First Post,… somehow,… well maybe i fix that tomorrow

This is the Last Update of the model:

Okay now This is the Base Mesh i started with (about 800 Poly, not optimized) and some Diffuse Material for the Color Layout.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]261415[/ATTACH]

After that i added all the details from the concepts that i recieved and reshaped some parts (now it was about 1800 Poly)
[ATTACH=CONFIG]261416[/ATTACH]

Attachments

[cerfribar]

Everything seemed to be fine so i started with the texturing and built some variations:

And here one of the Textures in Original Size:

On the Next day i got informed that the face must be changed, but i already built a texture, so i tried to reshape her with some Mesh morphs (shapekeys with proportional editing)

[cerfribar]

Well, but they dont liked it. so i started from scratch. This time i tried to Sculpt a Base for a later retopologie. So i started with these 2 without any details as you can see.

But the dont liked it. So i discussed a bit and built a complete new one. it’s closer to the shape of an actual seahorse and not so much cartoonish. still without details.

[cerfribar]

Soo next up there was some discussions about turning the eyes to the sides and adjust the neck more to the look of an actual seahorse (which in my opinion) completly destroys the cartoonish look. But well i did as i was told and this is the result:

Aaand once again, they dont liked it.
Today i recieved a new concept. this time with blueprints (side and front view) on a ortographic view. So hopefully i will finish the new base soon so i can do the texture part again.

[shaderbytes]

Thats a lot of dev for one model , I hope you are learning along the way. The last model looks tons better than the first. The correct shape is important even in doing a cartoon. Im not talking about proportions because these can be exaggerated but within this there are always certain key shapes and angles that are important to represent the character type properly.

[cerfribar]

i arranged the blueprints and applied them on transparent planes. so now i started with the new concept, which looks like that (rendered in ortoghraphic)

I think most difficult part will be the cheeks and eyes.
But the new Concept is clearly more looking like a mashup between a pony and a dragon in my opinion. Well we will see what it will end up :-).
Thanks for your Comment shaderbytes. You never stop learning, but this model takes way longer than the 6 other characters, which i built for this game. With texture and animating it took about 4-5 Hours for each, but for the Seahorse i already worked for 2 Days on it and finally had to reboot 2-3 times from scratch, which can be annoying.
But when you get paid for it, you dont complain

[mycatnameistux]

I can see first cartoon seahorse looks cute but it is what they want but you have to get changes from scratch to texture and animate. I can see your last concept looks alot better and hope it goes well for you. Good job!

[cerfribar]

I finished the base of the model. I also added the eyes and eyebrows.

And where is the Flower? well i have to wait for their decision, if it will be added or not.
i guess she will have a bit more polys as planned (currently 1.600)

So next up:

• Add eyelashes and add volume to the fins.
• Optimize mesh for lowpoly.
• UV Unwrap
• Texturing
• Rigging
• Animating

[cerfribar]

I added the eyelashes, added volume to the fin stuff, adjusted a bit the face and also improved the polycount (now 1568 Polys). I also added a edgesplit modifier and a triangulate modifier. I marked some edges on the head “fin” to give it some highlights.
Here a render with diffuse color Layout and a wireframe, from front and back:

So Hopefully if everything is fine i can start with the UV unwrapping & texturing soon. Maybe the colors will change a bit, but they are fine now for the basic layout.

[cerfribar]

I finally Unwrapped the Mesh and started to built a 256px texture. Baked the Ambient Occlusion and Texture. in Gimp i adjusted some transitions and applyied some random color variation to it. So that’s what she looks now:

This is the texture and the UV Layout:

With a 256px texture it’s hard to add fine texture details, but maybe i will add some more highlights to the Fins and the Belly.
Maybe the colors will change again.
So tomorrow i will hopefully finish texturing and also the rig with animations.