put my hands on the low-poly version of Odjin’s battle armor. the fine details will be added on the high-res version. this armor is fullbody covering and equipped with some very sharp parts , hence you should not make him mad . not to be seen on this series of renders are the wrist blades hidden in the shaft on his right lower-arm (but they are modelled and present). once i rigged that guy i’ll make some posing.
modified some more parts on the lower-leg and lower-arm to extrude a bit from the body giving more an armor feeling. also modified the wrist blades. they are now 3 instead of two and they have a much larger reach (if somebody is curious to know how he should be able to retract them: they are separated into 3 sub-blades which retract into the larger one kinda like a car antenna).
I think his feet are too small, it feels like he’s going to fall forward any second now. Also, is it going to be a low-poly char? And why not set smooth?
the feet are small, i know, but as it is Odjin dragged posed uprect i can hardly alter his main geometry. maybe in the worst case i could mess with the feet but i would like to keep this as last resort (as it yields troubles). [ i could perhaps do a certain ‘trick’ to avoid changing the geometry… i’ve to test out if that works ]
and yes it’s supposed to be a low-poly character.
why not smoothing? it looks totally shit as blender has no way to directly manipulate the smoothing by hand. furthermore you would not be able to recognize the geometry shape well like that. i could make a duplicate and split all hard edges, but for a simple render i considered this overkill
Yes, it is perfectly possible to manipulate the smoothing by hand. To smooth a face, select only that face and press setsmooth. Conversly, you can setsolid a single face. If you want to control the subsurf modifier, you can use creases (shift+e and drag) to control the effect of the subsurf on any given edge.
if you can make better without stepping away from the base-model, go ahead
@lightining: tried this already but the problem is that if you set a face smoothed ALL edges are smoothed or solid, but that’s exactly what i don’t want. i tried with creasing but it’s low-poly and sub-surfing it doesn’t do it well at all… it looks simply too round, and spending all day for creasing all edges to make it less round… i guess that’s a bit too much work for a simple preview render. but if you know a quick way, why not.
There’s supposed to be a good “Auto Smooth” option in the editing menu. Never gotten around to using it myself though.
Low-poly models are often built around their textures. But to make it more obvious that it’s an armor he’s wearing, have a look at how this dude has made the arm-armor. You’d be fairly able to tell it was not a part of his body even without the textures.
i use auto-smooth on sub-div models. there it works very well. just on low-poly models where i can not use sub-div the trick with auto-smooth doesn’t work. the reason is that there are angles at which a smoothing should be done but others where for the same angle or less it should not.
concerning the armor i know tried to make it obvious it is an armor. the problem here is that the armor is supposed to be full body. it is also not an armor you know from other games which have medieval or fantastical armor. it is supposed to be a nano-tech armor. it is not a generic armor but manufactured exactly for his body fitting it tightly. it should also be (by design concept art) rather fluid, with not too many parts standing out as it is a one-piece armor. that’s where the major problem comes from i try to model around. i have a bit of freedom, and that is where i added the parts standing out trying to make it look a bit more bulky without deviating from the one-piece look. if you have some tips there or ideas feel free to post them.
also the details will be normal-mapped ontop of it using a separate high-poly model. hence i tried to only do the most rough geometry on the low-poly. i still need to optimize the polycount as there are still vertices i can strip without harming and the wings are missing (still ‘bare’) and the jet-packs are missing too (on the back, under the wings).
It isnt the edges that are made smooth or solid, it is the faces- an edge can have both smooth and solid sides. I made some images to help explain. In each image there is only one mesh, and all faces are connected.
It’s worth noting that you can selectively set faces smooth or solid in edit mode. If you use set smooth in object mode blender will smooth all faces. Only thing that gets me about blenders smooth is I wish I could have smooth regions next to each other without a solid face in-between.
The model looks ok, I like the teeth. The legs look like they might have some issues later on though, topology seems kinda off to the eye but it could be the light setup. Anyway I’ll reserve judgement for a textured version.
@lightning: maybe i don’t understand that tool (which is well possible), but i don’t get that one. when i select a face and hit solid on all edges of that face the normals are split up. if i hit smooth, all edge normals are merged on that face. maybe like that you could somehow get things done but i end up always with broken up lighting. and with the auto-smooth i have the problem that i have most of the time faces at 80-90° angle which should be smooth but some at 45° should be hard edged. that’s something this tool doesn’t seem (to me) to do correctly without subdiving.
@Sonic TH: maybe you can elaborate a bit what exact problem you see. the legs are a bit peticular, that i am aware off. i’ll anyways try now to go for the high-res model first before digging deeper into the low-poly one as i have the impression, that i’m off a bit with what effect i really strive for.
damn this flu… i’m so tired i have to put sticks under my eyes so they don’t fall shut . still spend some work on the high-poly version of his battle armor. i’ll change some stuff in the low-poly version as it looks better this way. still needs a lot of work to get that one done.
I can’t think of the word for it at the moment but on the lowpoly model some of the faces looked like they were at odd angles that could screw things up later on. But like I said it might be the lighting. It was around the “knees”, more above them really.
I’ve not decided which is easier to do first, highpoly or lowpoly. I think I’m going the same route you are with my work in doing the highpoly first. I need to do some research on that to see what methods others prefer.
maybe you mean the thing at the knees which is a kind of ornament. i don’t know how to call them but this guy sports something similar (the golden square piece), just that mine is as broad as the knee is. but proper bone weighting should do the trick i hope. so far the base-form i could bone-weight to do things other games already fall apart even trying it … hence i assume i should manage to deal with that brute too.
concerning which one to go first, it depends. if you start from scratch doing the high-poly first is best as you can reduce polycount more and more until you end up with what your game engine can cope with. in this case though i had the base-form (the four legged form), which this armor is ‘wrapped’ around. hence i started with the low-poly to derive the armor from and then went to the high-poly to work it out. after that i’ll fix the low-poly by overlaying them to make things line up properly to use my Normal Map Generator on it.
shaped the place for the unit crest and shield-generator. shaped the upper and lower arms. includes now some shoulder stuff and under-arm protection. fixed some edge loops.
what i am not sure is now if i should make two big hornies at the shoulder (like now) or more like 3 or 4 smaller ones, more like blades. :o
Ok I see now, yeah that must of been what I was seeing, without textures details can be hard to pick out sometimes. The highpoly is looking good. I think I’d go with 3 “blades” myself.
, hence you should not make him mad 
. not to be seen on this series of renders are the wrist blades hidden in the shaft on his right lower-arm (but they are modelled and present). once i rigged that guy i’ll make some posing.
