I’ve been messing around with games for some time, so I decided to take on a pair of first-person arms.
Despite my recent familiarization with organic shapes, I can’t say that my first attempt at first-person arms went swimmingly. And because I plan to use these arms for several different weapons, I need to make damn sure that I’m building these correctly. So, here’s my current creation:
I’m still in the thick of the modeling process, I’ll attempt texturing, rigging, animation, and, lord forbid, weapons, once I know what I can improve upon, and follow suit. And just in case polycount becomes a problem, this thing is 4010 quads (which will become 8020 tris upon export).
Just FYI: I haven’t given up on this project yet. Just finishing up with the semester and trying to get all academic projects put aside. I have some textures on the hands and sleeves now:
…but I’m hardly confident that they’ll do at present. I don’t yet know how to tackle SSS in UDK (this render features Blender’s SSS), and I find the sleeves rather dull.
Finally got back to this thing again. I added some extra contrast and color to the sleeve, painted on some finer detail in the hand texture, and gave the fingers more of a refined bone structure.
I’m still unsure about some of the textures, as they lack contrast and interest, but I can’t think up any improvements there and this thread has pretty little traffic (just as well; it’s not updated often). I’m probably going to move on to the rigging next, as that’s the part I often have the most trouble with.
In hindsight, perhaps this thread would have been more fitting in WIP…
Rigging is always where I mess up the most. If there’s any part of the process in which I most need feedback, it’s this. If you have any critiques, feelings, or suggestions on the content of the next several posts, don’t hesitate to say so.
I can’t help you with rigging (I’m struggling through learning that myself presently), but I can offer the following critique: these arms are far higher res than they need to be. You don’t need to model in fingernails into a real-time model. You should be baking that kind of detail down into a normal map. Consider what the final poly count will be once you’ve added in a weapon and it’s going to be pretty substantial.
That said, it looks pretty good and the topology is solid.
Zaskaggs - I very likely should have stated prior to this point that I’d figured out the rigging thing; I’ve only just discovered automatic weighting, and it seems to work next to perfectly for this model.
That said, good suggestion on the poly count, as I hadn’t been watching the resolution very carefully. Unreal’s default first person arms are at around 4.5 K tris (sans-weapon), the models in the images above were at over 18K. I’ve started to strip loops off of the sleeve, as it won’t be shown directly, removed the multires from the hand, and plan to meld the fingernails back into the fingertips.
All that said, now the hand looks rather blocky, and not just in the normals.
You should add a texture though.
