I started using blender a couple years ago, but got out of the habit until this past week. I used the BSoD Animation tutorial to get myself started up again and I’ve just been going from there. I have quite a few ideas for scenes I might make for this and if I feel ambitious I might attempt to make a short. Opinions and suggestions are always welcome.
-ShaggyG
I like the skin texture! Is it a noise mapped to Nor? It looks really cool. Let’s see some more poses, facial expressions, maybe an animation?
It is really good - I suppose more work in needed to get the palm right. Well done!
Very cool, i think that hands are especially good, very original.
Thanks, the whole thing needs a bit more fine tuning I think as far as the modeling itself, aside from the head the whole shape is very basic and I’m not a fan of how the feet came out so those will be redone. This is also the first rigged character I’ve ever made so I’m a little shaky on the poses. Eventually I do hope to make an animation using this guy though. The skin texture is a combination of 3 different cloud maps, 2 for color and 1 for nor. I modified a “brains” material that I had created for a different project by changing the color and size.
-ShaggyG
NOTE: Please let me know if any of the images come out too dark. My laptop shows things much brighter than most other monitors so a lot of times it looks fine for me but other people can barely see it on their computers.
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I worked on it a little more, re-worked the elbows and a little on the hands. I’m less and less happy about it the further down I go. I like the head, the arms are acceptable, the torso needs work, the legs are pretty bad, and the feet are just plain horrible. I also seem to be having some issues with the rig where bending the hands or feet causes the wrist and ankle to deform to become very very thin and unrealistic. Any idea what may be causing that? I’ve included edit mode screenshots at multiple angles, a close-up of the ugly feet, and a new pose.
-ShaggyG
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Well, the texture is great! But the legs are too small for the body. Overall, the head looks too big for the body, so fix one of those to make it look like he can keep his head up without falling.
Do you mind to tell me your lighting settings? I like the way the renders come out.
As far as the head goes, I wanted it to be a bit too big for the body, but the legs I definately need to change. I’m currently trying to import a torso and arms from an old project, keep the same hands, and just re-do the legs and feet from scratch cause I really don’t like them.
As far as the lighting goes, when I’m back on the computer with blender I’ll take a screenshot of the setup but it’s just 2 basic spotlights tracked onto the alien from different angles. 1 of them is about 1.8 intensity, and the other is at the default 1. I also have a .4 intensity hemi light from directly above.
-ShaggyG
Just added the torso from the old project, and tested out making the neck a lot longer. Let me know what you think about the neck and torso. I think I need to tone down the collar bone area a bit, it seems too defined and human for this character. The arm that goes with the old project also seems to be a bit too muscular but I’m at least going to test it out. I might use shape keys to have the alien go from a docile more weak looking form to a muscular angry one at some point and see how that looks in an animation. That is a while away though as I haven’t even started re-rigging for animations.
-ShaggyG
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That last render looks sweet, reminds me of the whatcha-call-em Cloners in one of the “new” star wars movies. I dunno about the top of his head though, it’s like a cross between conehead and… something else. In my opinion you should level it or increase the shape you want, right now it looks inbetween, like a modelling mistake. And perhaps decrease the specularity a bit, he kind of looks like slimy toad now, which perhaps is where you want him, I just imagine the x-files looking aliens as dry, i.e less shiny.
It’s like a cloner from star wars, clone wars. but they are taller, less slimy, and different color.
EDIT: beaten to it
Hahaha wow you’re right, just for fun, here’s a texture-less render to make it look even more like the ones from the movie. I don’t have much time now but I’ll try a few changes to the head later on and see how it turns out.
- ShaggyG
EDIT: It does look better imo with less spec like in the render I just did without the texture so I’m going to tone it down a little bit on the skin material.
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Added in the arms, made the back part of the head a bit smaller. I don’t like the way the shoulders are but the torso is from an old model that has a lot of tris in it. I’m new to the whole animation side of things so let me know if you think that will cause a lot of problems when I do that.
-ShaggyG
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Looks good! Keep it up man!
Thanks, the shoulders are definitely going to cause some issues with looks. It seems to move fine when I pose the character, but it just doesn’t seem to look right. Is there any way to fix the mesh having so many tris without redoing it from scratch?
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Re-made the legs, and got rid of all the tris on the torso. Re-made the feet, I like them better than the other ones but still not happy with it. The body feels very basic still and it needs to be more defined to give him the look that I’m going for. Not sure if I want to go with the calm, pixar style alien like the original shots or for a sci-fi movie style one, but right now I feel like it’s half and half; which definitely doesn’t work. I wonder how hard it would be to use shape keys to be able to transform back and forth from a cartoonish alien to an angry one… Any thoughts? C&C are always helpful.
-ShaggyG
