Anyone else here attempting these insanely complex models? Advice?
Where did you get it?
Modelled it. Such as it is... It's kind of a "learning project". :-\
Good start...........good luck. :)
Thanks. :)
Theres a lot that could be said, but you doing it will say it better. Still a few things that will save you lots and lots of time over the long run...
1) model one side not both! Then mirror when finished
Even if you are getting good results by mirroring now as you model, it will lead to a tons of problems later... OR if you are coping parts and flipping them (legs), same issues will arise.
2) The legs should not be separate objects from the body, unless you will only ever have one pose (the one you are making now), then you will find your model just will not work later. It would be painful to learn weighting, do it, then find all your effort was for nothing.
Look at the workflow I show here in the first post 2nd image : http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,15741.0.html
It is a proven workflow I learned from much searching!
As far as having any part of the model being separately like your legs, the wings are interesting, and may prove functional mechanically, but I doubt it will work well when flapping. you have to think about skinning now as you model! I learned everything the hard way, don't do it the hard way!
Also I see you have a lot of detail in there already; muscle, veins and such. WHY? You should not even be thinking about that yet. Think back to drawing class. Do you start by shading, or by laying everything out? Same with modeling. Details are last.
OR
Are you sculpting first and then planning to re-top to a low polly? Even so, one model, one whole object.
But keep working, and keep talking. You can do it!
Yeah, my mind is kind of all over the place on this one. I think its the way my brain works, when I have ideas, I tend to try to get them out before I lose the inspiration. I think I see what you mean by getting the basic shape out, but why all one object? I thought by doing it this way, if I didn't like any single one part, then I could just redo that one part? And it is being mirror-imaged, maybe it doesn't look like it.
And actually, I do have a tendency to draw much the same way; ;D Something I'll have to work on...
Quotebut why all one object?
It needs to be one object because what you are making now is only the skin (effectively). When thats done you have to make bones, the bones are how you will make the object move naturally. The object will be "skinned" to the bones. So then when you move the bones the skin will stretch (and so will your texture), to make this look good is called "weighting".
So first you model, then you skin, then you weight (and pose), then you animate, to put it very simply.
And all of these parts are trades of their own. Mastering them all it a lot of work, but can be done. And is well worth the effort too! (not that I think I am a master of any part of the process.)
QuoteI thought by doing it this way, if I didn't like any single one part, then I could just redo that one part?
You can, just delete out the leg you don't like. But start with the torso, and get that right so you don't need to start over. work from a "3 view" http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zFdRYMC-I1o/UtPzFrbIBrI/AAAAAAAACEM/rDIpu2mgxnQ/s1600/loomis_orthomale.jpg
https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQHqslnDYVuK43nReuABJykmaNiRJCDkeUuILuujvYU0WOmYi-4
http://th04.deviantart.net/fs71/PRE/i/2013/034/8/f/character_orthographic_test_by_shannon_the_dragon1-d5tr6i5.jpg
You may think, well thats cartoony, and you may not want that. But the 3- view I used to make the images below was a cartoon too. I changed it as I went from other images I found and studied, even used a toy I could hold and look at.
The top two are my low polly base and the bottom is my VERY VERY high polly sculpt. I can now transfer the maps from the sculpt and displace the low polly to look like the high polly but with very few polygons.
Very nice! I see I have a lot to learn...
It only feels like a lot. When you get to the other side, it will feel much better.
It needs some serious polish....and a head.
And some wingskin or will they be feathers?
Quote from: Dune on June 26, 2014, 01:06:51 PM
And some wingskin or will they be feathers?
Actually, I was thinking of tying a fluorescent tarp on those things. ;D
??? .................
I don't know how your program works, but in Lightwave you can bridge between polygons, so you could cut of parts of the legs and torso and have them blended by bridging. Then adjust smooth transitions. But it might be awkward to get it right.
Quote from: Dune on June 27, 2014, 02:59:46 AM
I don't know how your program works, but in Lightwave you can bridge between polygons, so you could cut of parts of the legs and torso and have them blended by bridging. Then adjust smooth transitions. But it might be awkward to get it right.
I'm just waiting to see if I can make the legs better and have them the right shape and size before I commit them and merge it all together nicely.
Reworked the back spikes so it doesn't look so much like a dinosaur. Repositioned the wings and front legs to be more in line with the spine.
The wings were harder than I thought they'd be. Had to redo the wing structure I had built.
How did you go about making the wingskin? Copy points of the fingers and make another mesh from those? I have to make a tipi, so I have to find out the best way to do that. The idea I just mentioned crossed my mind. Or the FXCloth method in LW.
It never occurred to me to use a cloth function. :-[ I just might have to go back and try that. But no, I made it like I made much of the dragon so far; started with a primitive. In this case a cube. Then I made it really wide and long, and then squished it down to be really thin. Then I cut away the pieces of the cube that fell outside of the wings fingers. At this point, I had the wingskin filled in but it was completely flat. I then used a combination of Move and Smooth to give it the curves that it has.
Edit: I added a fourth wingskin, and i'll probably add a fifth. Took a video this time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JV3S3wdqSE
After that, it was just move and smooth. Or whatever the lightwave\zbrush\mudbox equivalent is. Sorry about the length. My free video capturer doesn't support timelapses. I might breakdown and buy one.
Progress. I'd say I'm about 50% done.
Detail render...
After an inspirational epiphany, several late nights, and more earl greys than I can count.
Looks good to me..................can't wait to see it textured. :)
Quote from: yossam on July 08, 2014, 10:03:56 PM
Looks good to me..................can't wait to see it textured. :)
Yeah, me too. The raw model is running around 16.6 million polys. Although the exported version will be nowhere near that, I'm hoping I'm not making it so complicated as to be a pain texturing.
Grabbed a neat screenshot while it was realtime rendering.
This thing isn't even close to being done. Although I did throw some quick shaders on it just to see...
It has certainly come a long way already!
- Oshyan
Redid the hind legs. Redid the back spikes (again). Really running out of inspiration for this model. Probably going to finish it off for now, and get a working version going and come back to it in a few months. Still, I think for my first creature model, it went pretty good.
Looking good IMO. :)
Yeah, it's really 'nice'. Can't wait to see this textured in a TG render!
Attempting to get the topology down. So far, it's been rough going...
Edit: I guess that would be retopology, wouldn't it?
One of these days, it's just going to work.
One of these days, I'm going to have this thing in a great jaw-dropping Terragen scene.
That day is not today.
Probably not tomorrow.
And you may as well scratch all of next week, too.
But one day, you'll all log on to the forum, and there it'll be.
For now, I'm going to go scream into a pillow. Then at the pillow. Call it names and stuff.
I admire your patience. Keep it going, not for the dragon (there are dragons about, like in DAZ even), but for the experience of making stuff yourself. I'm patient :)
Your frustration makes me feel better. ;)
By the way, that face is looking really nice. Those teeth seriously make me uncomfortable. they are not even teeth, they are just murder sticks! :o
Thanks for the good words, guys. Gives me more fuel to keep going.
Quote from: Dune on July 24, 2014, 03:04:56 AM
I admire your patience. Keep it going, not for the dragon (there are dragons about, like in DAZ even), but for the experience of making stuff yourself. I'm patient :)
I remember seeing Daz's Millenium Dragon a few years ago and wondering how anyone could model something so complicated. Just by sheer happenstance, I looked it up again yestereday to do a bit of a comparison. Granted, theirs is beginning to look a little dated, but it's still quite good. I think I may have them beat a little bit by modelling, but they have some seriously good textures on it (which is currently a serious weak point for mine, as I have no concrete plans for any decently realistic textures). I was actually going to use their dragon. Even about 5 weeks ago, the very idea I could be this far along on a dragon was a pipe dream. Still, this remains mostly a learning project, as my need for such a model is not great at all.
Quote from: TheBadger on July 24, 2014, 03:09:30 AM
Your frustration makes me feel better. ;)
By the way, that face is looking really nice. Those teeth seriously make me uncomfortable. they are not even teeth, they are just murder sticks! :o
Yeah, I like the teeth, too. My initial plan was to go with ones that were larger and more overt. But these turned out nicely. The details are coming good, although most of them were baked into the normal map, which clearly did not survive the export process (along with a few other things). Although you can see them in the modeller's renders.
In any event, I think I'm going to take a few days, maybe work on some less complicated models see where the flaws in my process are.
Quote from: TheBadger on June 26, 2014, 01:20:30 AMThe top two are my low polly base and the bottom is my VERY VERY high polly sculpt...
Badger, I am impressed by your Deinonychus. What did you use to do the high-poly details? Z-Brush? I have kept all of my creature poly counts down in fear of the reasons you pointed out in your "Don't map high-poly objects" thread. Maybe some day I will add the detail. Right now I am interested in creating a lot of low-poly rough models.
Mud with maya.
I still need to get back to him and fix some areas. So I never rigged him. But I will. He was easy to UV map. But that one I did the right way, then I disregarded what I learned and started doing things the wrong way. But at least now I completely understand why the wrong way is wrong... Not the least of which is because the wrong way hurts ;D
I dont have anything bad to say about Z. The work people do with Z is the reason I wanted to learn a sculpter in the first place. But mud in combination with a modeler is easier to learn I think. Also, Mud is free in some cases and Z is not free in any case. so, thats the big part of it for me.
Thanks for the complement.
Well, it's not jaw-dropping, but it's not bad.
Now, I can rest. :)
Time to fly...
8)
The exhaust is on the wrong end (sorry, bad joke :P ). This is coming together nicely. You didn't rig the beast, did you?
For a first try of a dragon it looks very good.
I wouldn't even try any organic model of that kind.
To me the part that mostly comes as needing improvement is this:
[attach=1]
It could be even more to the back side like on bat's.
It is your dragon of course :)
@Dune: I haven't rigged it yet. Wouldn't even know how... Of course, up until 4 weeks ago, I did not know how to model a dragon, so... But yes, I'm looking at some rigging options so I can pose it better.
@Kadri: Yes, Kadri, that's one of the changes I'm looking at for the next iteration of the dragon, among many others. I think I'll probably end up remodelling more than half of it. So far, I haven't used any reference images, as I wanted to see what I could come up with on my own. Now that inspiration is beginning to come back, I'll look up some other dragon designs, set up a plan and get back to work. This thread could go on for years as I tweak it endlessly.
Remodelling those wings was about the least amount of fun I've ever had. Hope I can redo the texture I had, too.
I'm back on the horse er, dragon... whatever.
Did some detailing on the wing 'arm'. Also remodelling the body, which I was never satisfied with (waits for verbal lashing from Badger on the correct procedure to do things ;) ). Made him fitter and smaller.
Updates are likely to be fewer and farther between. I'm not 'in the zone' like I was in the summer, but I got some ideas and more modelling experience...