Rüdiger - Gollum-esque speed model

Artwork Focused Critiques
1

Hey guys,

this is “Rüdiger”, a model I made some months ago. I started him out as a normal human being but something went wrong and he started to look a bit like that Gollum thing from Lord of the Rings.

ruediger1.png500×1000 213 KB

ruegider2.jpg999×999 82.8 KB

The main focus was on a clean topology and exploring where my problems with modeling humanoid faces are. The area around the eyes looks crappy, and the nose could need some work.

Any comments welcome :slight_smile:

Greetings,
Daerst

2

1- Reference, reference, reference… Especially for humans.
2- This could really be a great model if you went to town on it with the sculpt tools and gave him some wicked wrinkles, creases, moles, and other minutia. I’d recommend the “multi-resolution” modifier to get the extra subdivisions you need for sculpting details.
3- Materials and textures. Perhaps a subtle SSS along with a skin pore texture (could be a procedural - maybe voronoi would work well). Just something more than the diffuse colour it has now.
4- Lighting - make yourself a new .blend and light yourself a sphere to test things out. Perhaps a 3 point setup - Main Spot , Rim Light, and Fill Light. Experiment or lookup tutorials to find something you like. Then you can save the blend and import your lights into any scene to quickly light and preview your models. Saves me oodles of time since I don’t have to re-create lighting rigs from scratch every time I want to light a model.
5- Teeth.
6-?
7-Profit

Good start - keep on blendin!

3

Hello turquoiserabbit,

Thanks for your reply!

Sculpting: When I made that guy the latest Blender build was 2.52 - lots of sculpt tool crashes on my machine. The 2.49b sculpting speed was a pain, so I quickly lost the will to sculpt him. But Blender 2.55 is running really smooth now, so I’ll give it another try soon :slight_smile:

Material: I definitely need to work on that. I will read a tutorial on subsurface scattering and give him some details. The current texture’s really plain:

speedmodel_tex_compressed.jpg1024×768 10.5 KB

Lighting: This one has a basic 3-point setup, but I couldn’t get it to look really good so far.

lighting.jpg1024×795 72.7 KB


Maybe the positioning of the lights is too “flat”? Gotta play around with that. Thanks for “lighting blend.file” tip. Sounds helpful :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Daerst

4

light-test.jpg540×540 21.7 KB

light-setup-test.blend (454 KB)For the lighting I would make stronger shadows. Mainly by choosing one light source to be the “primary” and decreasing the strength of the other two considerably. Also you can play around with making the primary light a warm colour, and the secondary lights cool colours to give dynamic contrast. I’ve tried to attach a blend file example with suzanne for you to look at. Picture is there anyway.

It has three lamps, all spots, one bright orangey one, one cool blue one and one almost facing the camera with white rim lighting.