Kiddo Polly count

Hey guys!

So just finalising Kiddo and putting him all together.
So far I have knocked off 10000, pollys on his shoes, and just smashed off 200 pollies from the cap, the cap now also has much better topology. Everything else is all good, apart from the head and Im still not sure what im going to do with the hair but Ill work somthing out.
Thinking about remodeling the head, just because Im not happy with it in general but I could also smash off a couple of hundred pollys if I did do it.
So far what you can see in the image below is 12400 pollys which I think is pritty good, this means that the final character may be 20000 pollys which I think is workable, considering the one I gave you emma was something like 32000 I think...
Oh well I will keep working at it :) should have it done real soon!
Ok so he is so close to being complete, just have to wrinkle up his pants and add hair and thats it.
In this state at the moment he is exactly 20232 pollys. Which is very close to what I estimated. I redid his head from scratch burning about 400 pollys off it and with a much better topology for facial animation.Hey guys.
So here is kiddo pritty much done, modeling wise... he is 21028 pollies, the wrinkles in his pants might look a bit weird but when you see them in full turn around/ textured I think they should be fine. Ill email Andrew the file now.

The shoe WIP!

Here ya go guys, the remake of the sneakers, all over again. And only 770 pollies so far! But this time it is so much easier and I know what Im doing, in the end its all just good practice. Ill update as I go :

Just some screwin around in mentalray.

More detail and the shoe is still only 1800 pollies, goin well :)

New render

So close to being done now, just have to wack on the tabs on the sides and thats its, should have kiddo done fully by tomoz then I will send it to Andrew to be UVed and Textured while I either get onto rigging or working on the cop.
DONE! 9926 pollies all together!

Some Changes

Hey gang!

Sooooo I did some experimental research over the past 2 days and found out a fair bit o stuff.
First of all Normal mapping is generally only used in games, I found through experimenting with Kiddo's cap and trying everything I could with different retopo, UV mapping techniques that if you dont have much detail to map, it dosent look too grand at all. We are much better off just useing the pollies as best we can (which will still give off the quality we are looking for) and just use bump maps where we can.

For example these shoes here http://www.flickr.com/photos/asterokid/2460413710/in/set-72157604361232024/ are just modeled and then bump mapped and textured, and they look friggen sickcore. So once again textures are the key :)

Also I relised that mentalray will render out geometry which is in 'smooth mesh preview' this means that if we have to we can keep the geometry of the charcaters real low (without having to smooth them) and just hit '3' on the keyboard before we render.

So00 over the next few days I will be kit bashing Kiddo, which means rebuilding parts which need rebuilding such as the sneakers and making sure they are as low polly as possible, and then stuff that dosent need to be rebuilt can just be thrown back in and udjusted.

This should take out a massive chunk of work time as well, not having to go low geo to high geo, then retopo, UV's, texturing then normal maps and ambient occlusion maps, then to rigging...

Should be good and Im pumped!

Tell me your thoughts?

Kiddo High Quality Render

Just wipped up this high quality render while still trying to work out Normal Maps.
Not having much luck in getting them to look real prime but yea... Ill figure somethin out soon.

Cityscape Reference Pictures

http://www.steambotstudios.com/V2/portfolio.php

Shot 1

here are some screen caps for the opening shot (page 1 of storyboards). Pretty close match so far, but need to work out why the camera doesn't crop the same in preview compared to render...

City Lighting

i took the image that andrew posted in the previous post and started using that as a reference for lighting the city. below are a few different styles of lighting that i came up with.





really its a question of what colours would best suit and compliment the characters. im thinking either a turquoise or purple base.

Let there be color...

Some color on the city, to deliver the final "look".

spirit progress

get my but into gear in the next few days to just get this done already!

alright so I needed to post something... the spirit should have been done by now, but things have been happening week after week for the past 3 weeks, so there is no real progress so I am really going to

environment pics

... that i haven't posted up earlier because i am lazy.

this first one is more the lighting that we would actually be using. this is a software render. i got louise to help me last week fixing up the lighting so that we can render with software, as the next ones are in mental ray and taking way way way too long.

ive been trying to fix up issues with rendering and lighting... and referencing is a b***h!! hope that ive actually ironed out these issues though.

this one has no shadows. but its a rough idea. ill re-render some more with shadows soon. i didnt realise i had them turned off. :(



these ones are in mental ray. the lighting is way too harsh, but some of them look ok.