Mantis

Artwork Focused Critiques
1

Hello all,
this is my first post here in the focused critique thread. I am working on a game. This is a character I drew up about a year ago, and have finally tried to get it into blender. Have a look, and I do have some very specific questions later.

http://i147.photobucket.com/albums/r317/greggy_05/MANTISDETAILED.jpg
MANTISDETAILED.jpg800×600

http://i147.photobucket.com/albums/r317/greggy_05/MANTISDETAILED2.jpg
MANTISDETAILED2.jpg600×800

http://i147.photobucket.com/albums/r317/greggy_05/MANTISDETAILED5jpg.png
MANTISDETAILED5jpg.png800×600 191 KB

This is far from finished, but I had some questions for anyone more experienced out there.

  1. The Bicep/Shin “energy rods”. I am attempting to have these look like lightsabers. I am using the Halo option, and mapping a hard noise cloud texture set to Col, Nor (pressed twice-yellow) & Emit. I would like for these to actually emit real light–I am intuiting that the only way to do this might be to vertex parent some weak colored lamps to the mesh?? Anyone??Suggestions?

  2. I am running up against hardware limitations with this model. I was going to do some normal mapping using DeNormGen (I cant recommend highly enough), however, punching up to the necessary detail level needed to sculpt subtle details like the abdominal muscles, navel and the strecchy skin around the navel–as well as more “mech” looking details to the bikini armor (probably around 5-6 multires generations up from the current model – the current model has 2556 faces). Therefore the upper portion of the bikini armor is just a texture that is following the UV layout and set to normal in the Tex editor. This ends up looking more “spartan” and less “sci-fi” than I had hoped. Would like suggestions as to possible hardware upgrades and or workarounds. Please bear in mind this step was attempted before adding any textures.

  3. Each part of the mesh has about 2-4 texture channels enabled. This is one homogenous mesh. Is there a way to bake these textures as is, retaining the light reflecting properties in order improve performance?

  4. I would also welcome any aesthetic criticism as well.

Look forward to your replies!

Thanks,
Greg

2

Modeling looks pretty interesting but the lighting makes it hard to appreciate the details. I am going to suggest adding 3 skylight buffered shadow spotlights around him with intensity 0.5 and soft shadows = 20 and a spotlight somewhere in front with intensity of 1.5 and soft shadows = 1. And you should pose it too so we can get a better idea of it’s personality.

3

Will give that lighting thing a try–
Also, this is not rigged yet—As soon as I get it rigged I will post posed pix.
Am going to try to get YafRay to render this and see what happens…will let you know.
thanks for the reply!

4

Some updated renders…
this first one is with the lighting you had suggested…much nicer. Thanks for the tip!
http://i147.photobucket.com/albums/r317/greggy_05/mantisnewlight.png

this one, different lighting–YAFRAY…yafray=scary details–this is a bit underexposed, i think, but this is my first Yaf render…I’ll get the hang of it.

http://i147.photobucket.com/albums/r317/greggy_05/YAFMantis.png

there appears to be some artifacts on the skin texture too. Any ideas? This was a PNG

5

the newer skin texture looks nice :smiley: with yafray, some of the mechanical parts don’t look as well textured in yafray though, anyway nice creepy character. Looks like something you’d see wandering around unreal tournament 3 XD. I have no idea about the artifacts, maybe it’s from lighting? the nose looks a little weird, but I guess it’s the style.