One of the many traits I dislike about myself is my stubbornness when it comes to uploading work. It's of course a completely defeated argument but the thought in my head as always been that the work could always be better and I'd hate to give someone a bad first impression of my work my throwing something up online that I don't think is up to par. The problem of course is that I am also very fussy about what constitutes as 'up to the par' and as such, if it wouldn't make the front page of Artstation, why bother sending it out?
There's a level of ego I'm well aware of in that statement but I think the sentiment is born of insecurity, it's hard to judge where your work sits quality wise when your mostly surrounded by students on the same rung of the ladder and exposed to experts showcasing the height of their craft on sites like 10 Thousand Hours, Zbrush Central and Artstation.
Although I tend to circulate my work around a dozen or so artists throughout the pipeline for feedback, the fear of showing the world work that i think has problems terrifies me, and it's a fear I need to conquer. Today, I thought I'd discuss a project I've worked on this year and try to talk about its positives and negatives in terms of improvement. I'm not one for favouring anything I do so I see this as more an exercise in constructive self criticism. What went well and what could be improved?
Hutch
I mentioned in an earlier blog post that I was planning on creating a psychopathic character called Hutch who would play the role of the antagonist in a short motion capture performance that I was working on. Whilst the project itself wanders on, my part in it is mostly done and as such it's a good time to look at what worked and didn't work about it.
The Hutch project is a strange one as it stands as somehow the best human character I've made and yet has a decided in-humaness to it. It reminds of the classic villain line 'your best ain't good enough' and to bring it back to another earlier entry, I think it is very much the victim of my division between character and environments. Had I dedicated myself fully to creating good characters and anatomy, this project would of had the backing of two years of trained experience and an observant eye should the details stick out. Instead, it is technically the 6th human character I've ever sculpted which might sound like it should be stronger but in the scheme of things, it's the quite weak. I spent a lot of time studying the anatomy of 3d scan models to get this right which is why I think it is an improvement on what came before but by that same token, the anatomy of the legs in and the arms in particularly really bugs me, especially when I recently tried to pose it.
I worked on a minotaur character throughout March in response to this disatisfaction and there's already been a dramatic improvement with the muscle shapes and forms of the body not only considered but fully seen and developed. A great piece of advice from previous graduate Jack McCaver was to 'build the shapes, don't draw them' and he's completely right. The arms especially fall victim to this as I developed the surface detail of what I thought should be there but never committed in earnest to pushing out that muscle, partly because I didn't want him to be very ripped and partly from my misunderstanding of the structure of the muscles.
The other major negative for me besides the slim shape of his arms and legs it the colouring of the skin. Again, whilst an improvement from previous attempts, it lacks the fine-tuning that makes skin feel deep and is generally just too over coloured and bright. It almost feels stylised in certain regards with an orange sheen to the flesh that hides some of the detail work put into it.
On the positive side of things, the faceial structure I thing is a big leap forward from previous attempts and suffers mostly due to blending my references rather than focusing on one key figure. The face actually feels like a face which is rare and although I think I'm better tailored to creature work than hard core human anatomy, I think with a couple more attempts or maybe some dedicated daily studies, this could improve greatly.
I think this is also a big step up for my organic surface modelling, the vest itself its something I think stands up as a strong piece, at least in my library with a lot of subtle cloth detail and some nice finishing texture. Whilst not perfect, I think I took advantage of my poly count relatively well and blended my normals effectively, though the stark colouring does leave a lot to be desired. I'd love to improve by using marvellous designer to build the base; though I've done a lot of work in MD recently, it's always been for clothing rather than explicit soft body objects like bags and vests so it would certainly be an interesting line to pursue.
Overall, though I do think Hutch is a step in the right direction, I consider the piece a bit of a failure in terms of what it set out to be. As far as creating a game ready character, though elements of him standalone as positives, I focused to much on capturing the subtle elements and not on the larger forms (such as the muscles definition in the silhouette), just for comparison, here is a character asset from a modern game:
Ignoring disparities in render quality, the forms and shape of this soldier are a lot more appealing, , the legs actually have a density and nice shape despite being quite slim and the skin shading, though not terribly realistic without the bells and whistles of SSS, is still subdued and nicely toned. I've still got a lot to learn before I can get a character to this point, clearly.
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