Spearfighter, Work in Progress

[Johannes]

Hi all!,

Here's the latest piece I'm working on at the moment. There's still a fair amount of detail work to do (the base, the actual spear as opposed to a placeholder, buckles, fine wrinkles etc...) but hopefully the overall gesture works so far. I wanted to explore some ideas on the look of aging while retaining physical fitness, so I decided to play with a few of the non-facial signs of aging like male pattern baldness (it's not real visible at these angles though), and the general thinning of tissue around the hands as well as examining the beginning of wrinkle patterns and the like. I'm finding it real tricky to go far enough that the signs "read" at any distance but not going too far and making the concept look much older than desired (about 50ish), so any suggestions are a big help.
As always, any thoughts/suggestions are always welcome

Johannes

[Johannes]

Hi All!,

Here's the latest update on this sculpt. I mainly attacked the face and the reworked the padded armor "skirt", although that still needs it's own pattern work. Also decided to rework the shirt/vest with a different pattern that I hope feels less forced, for lack of a better word. There was also some minor tweaking of the back leg, although I'm still not 100% satisfied with the pose (It just doesn't feel like he's connected to the ground solidly enough).
Ran into two problems, and was wondering if anyone else finds this happening:

1. When going up to high res (1,000,000+ polys) there seems to be a problem where any pole points (5+ edges coming together) creates a very small but noticeable divot when smoothing is used. I think this may be because subdividing doesn't change the fact that a pole point exists, and pole points tend to be unpredictable with how they deform and render, but that's just a guess. If anyone knows of a fix for this, other than trying to hide pole points as best as possible, it would be a big help .

2. With thin double sided surfaces like the "skirt", even with backface masking on, brush deformations seem to affect the hidden side in odd ways such as pulling it through the side being sculpted. Some of the brushes seem worse about this than others, (especially clay tubes, snake hook and smoothing brushes). The best workaround I've found for fixing the effect is to carefully inflate the offending subtool with the tool>deformation>inflate function, but again, I'd be very grateful if anyone knows other ways to solve this problem.

As always any thoughts, critiques or suggestions are always welcome!

[tez]

Some quality modling there, nice clean detail.

Im no expert but just from personal perspective I would move his right hand a bit further up the stick so he has a better grasp.

Age wise id take the sharpess of his jaw line down a bit and add somemore weight to the chin, cheek, eye bags to show gravity.

I like this and will be keeping a watch on its progress.

[Johannes]

Hi!,

First:

Tez, thanks for the critique! I went back and clowned around some more with the face, hopefully it's a little better now. The trickiest part seems to be doing the wrinkles in a way where they have a clear read but aren't harsh, but I think I found a solution after scanning the troubleshooting board and finding out that the standard brush has a pinch effect when set with a positive brush mod (wish I'd thought of that sooner... ) and then using the smooth brush with a spotty alpha and the "spray" stroke - the combination seems to have a very different effect from the flattening effect that the straight smooth brush does, to ease the wrinkles down to the desired depth. Again, many thanks for the help!

I also went back and changed the "skirt" so it hopefully looks a little heavier and reworked the design motif to match the vest since that seems to read better at a distance. I'm also hoping it ties the whole appearence together a little more, but we'll see.

The new base was actually a lot easier than I'd expected - apparently ZB is quite a bit better at "environment" stuff than I thought. Just grab a bunch of alphas, have a heavily subdivided polycube of some kind and start drawing masks and using the inflate/deflate deformation, then go back and clean stuff up with the brushes. I'll definitely have to start exploring this more.

hope everyone is doing well!,

Johannes

[Pegasus]

Impressive detailed modell...

[aesis412]

very nice, i like the cloth stuff.