To hell and back

Well, it's finally done. The character project is over and I have a result that I'm actually quite pleased with. Sure it could be better, I can see lots that could be done to improve it. However it's loads better than my first character and the most gratifying thing to see as an artist is improvement. It's the most you could hope for with your work anyway.

So baking actually went very smoothly. I've scrapped using x-normal for my bakes because baking in 3Ds max does yield much better results. I now make a cage from my low poly, export it, use push and pull to get it cover the high poly completely, re-import it back as a cage for my low poly and then bake at 4096 which I'll downscale later as needed. I also split my character bakes up into multiple pieces and baked them separately, then compiled the normal maps in photoshop. This all yielded the cleanest bakes I've ever had, and it saved me lots of time as I didn't have to spend ages fixing them!

Pics of final bake and model with only normals applied to it:

Texturing was a bit trickier, however substance as always is a godsend for quickly creating high quality textures once you know how to use the programme properly. The textures for the face still need a lot of work as I'm not too happy with the roughness and thing the skin could do with more pores. I'd also really like to create realistic eyes for my character at some point, however as always, I had to cut things a bit short because of deadlines. One day I'll be good enough to make very good work in such a short amount of time, but for now I'll settle with producing good work, after-all it's my current best, and doing my best is all I can do.

The good news is I managed my time on this project a lot better than I did for the sentry gun, so this time I had more time to edit the textures in Photoshop once I'd come out of substance.

Textures:

Thankfully the textures read well in both engine and marmoset, although as always I opted to render in marmoset as this gives much better results.

Here are my beauty shots and wireframe renders:

I also managed to finish my Hades concepts:

And get my final concept done:

Which I did in the style of Shogun Total war concepts as I felt this best reflected the style of my characters, ancient and simple, yet aesthetically pleasing.

So thats that, for the full body of work I produced for this project please take a look at the post 'dichotomous duo hand in' which is where I compiled everything I did for the project in summary, as well as the work required to hand in via the blog.

Next up, the final project of the year. Off the map!