I love this thread, great work
Hey guys, hereās my contribution to the art dump with some renders of delta squadā¦and a few others:) Iāve been a loooong time follower of this forum, so it feels good to finally contribute to such an awesome community of artists. I can post some wires and work in progress shots tomorrow if anyone would like to see them.
Attachments
Drone HP
Attachments
I am truly impressed with the humble move of showing us all the hard work you guys put into these characters. The inspiration you give me and Iām pretty sure many artists here, is priceless.
Guys if it is not too much to ask I think it could nice if any of you shared an example of what the UVs of one these characters looks like? and perhaps the rendering setting you guys used in max to get those nice crisp clay renders of the characters. Well if not possible, Itās cool too. Thanks once again for sharing all your work.
Greetings,
First of all, i would like to say that i truly appreciate what yourāre doing here, i second what dagoned said above, all this content you guys are putting here is unbelievable. These images give so much inspiration as well as learning material.
Second thing iād like to talk about, well, itās more like a question actuallyā¦ What kind of PC Rig do you guys have (what kind of Motherboards, CPUās, RAMās, Video cards and all that good stuff)? I ask this because i want to transition from 2D art to 3D character/creature modeling. Itās also that time that i need to buy a new PC so it all comes together, and your answer here will greatly influence my decision on that front. I need a machine powerful enough that can handle models of this complexity and higher without any hickups. I hope to see a reply from at least one of you.
To clarify, this is adressed to:
Wallaby Joe (Chris Wells), Krl55Lanning (Kevin Lanning), rv_el, and others from GoW3 team
One last thing, is there any possibility that you could also post the concept art by James Hawkins that goes along with these models, this way it would be a complete package. For an concept artist like myself this kind of stuff would be like a dream come true.
In any case, thank you for all your effort and your time.
Take care,
Armand āAeonseraphā Lacums
Good to see you here!
Kevin, thereās one thing that i would like to ask.
What kind os pieces of the armors you guys build in Zbrush?
And what was made using 3ds Max?
I would love to see them!
EPIC! ! You are my idol! I am very grateful to publish these valuable information! ! This is simply beyond words!Great! !
awesome work and one amazing game well done
Even though I would not win I think you guys should do a GOW concept character contest and have the prize be some training or feature the character in a new game or something! Who else thinks this is a great idea?
No comment!
My hat goes off to you chaps, stunning work. I hope you post more zbrush screenshots too. Also I would like to ask how the mesh like netting on Anya and some of the other models was made? Sometimes it looks sculpted on and others, like separate geometry? Thanks! ^^
Great fantastic work! Thought kenneth scott was behind this but i guess heās in idsoftware now doing great work as well for Rage.
As for Deimās critiques, may be very subjective, but particularly the first one for the first character heās got a point.
Keep up the great work, hope you let us know how long did it take to make a model like this on average?
I donāt think iāve posted this here yet. I posted over at Polycount. Iām not sure how much it matters for ZBC but for the % of you guys that are doing game work etcā¦
NOTE: The vert count as seen in Unreal Editor is what we care about most. It feels like knowing 2 languages. Triangles is what iāve worked with for ages. Trying to think of things in terms of verts, especially when your UV chunks change so much and are hard to predict, is pretty hard. Characters range but I suppose it was good for us to not go above 10k verts on many characters (atleast the ones I did).
This is an older character of mine at Epic and I donāt really like looking at these wires, but I hope they help. This is the same model from the previously posted Hoffman image showing the HP next to the LP+Normal and Diffuse (color).
My personal recomendation to people in this line of work is this - contiguous meshes not only do not matter for high poly or low poly they can actually be worse! Do whatever it takes to make your high poly. Then in your low poly you should talk to your resident rigger extroidenarire (our guy is crazy insane with it!) and they will tell you whats good and we find that a lot of interlocking pieces (so long as you can afford it and the overlap isnāt too close to each other on the surface) are a better solution. I.E the āshoesā inside the boots. Separated out pouches. Infact my later characters often have arms that go into the gloves instead of welded into them. This model today would have a more neutral face, arms going into gloves, and more overlap on the shoulderblade area on the arms. Plus I probably would have tried to shoot for 12k triangles or something. may be.
Attachments
I got a Question Did u retopo In 3DS Max? Amazing job I was thinking every GOW model was on 50K polys average but Itās amazing to know are low poly great jobā¦
ā¦ but I would love to see more wireframes! and texture maps! pleeeeeeeeeeease! 
I asked about their pipeline in a different thread and that artist at least used the graphite tools in 3ds for it.
edit: Thanks for the wires and the explanation of how you decide to break the model down. The vert/tri counts are also appreciated. Iām guessing most of the humanoid monsters follow the same general principles but I would be interested in seeing the wires and how you break it down for one of the bigger crazier monsters. Iām guessing those vert/poly counts are determined by how often it appears on screen/cinematics/if its a boss/etc.
@everyone else
Make sure youāre being reasonable with what you ask guys. One wire of a human is probably enough for us to figure out how they did the rest. Theyāre already being super generous so lets not get greedy with what weāre asking.
Once again thanks to the guys at epic for taking the time to share this stuff.
Wow this stuff is blowing my mind. Iām absolutely in love with all the sculpts, renders etc., it looks awesome ! Canāt get better than that, very much appreciated. Would you mind uploading a picture of some wireframe? that would be cool too EPIC 4TW great post!
One other question though, which program did you use creating these character? I mean did you model them in 3ds max or in maya? Because I am learning 3ds max at the moment and I wanted to know from you Professionals what you recommened, I really love 3ds max as a polymodeling program, but which program is more popular? 3ds max or maya in the gaming industry? Would be nice if you answer this =)
Best regards,
Kenny
Great work! Thanks for dumping it on the forum for the world too see. This stuff deserves to be seen!
Droma is right. I use many things but Graphite polysurf is probably a key one to know.
- I export out division 1 of the model and use it in parts (often i plan this ahead before sculpting, in some cases)
- I polysurf with Graphite, although that tool is incredibly buggy. You have to learn its quirks and may have to reset Max a lot in process
- By hand, especially when Graphite is not digging what iāve got going on for some reason.
- Using old pieces of geo perfect matched or close-to matching. (this can include taking low poly chunks from the other awesome artists at Epicā¦ Anything to get it doneā¦)
I know some other artists here have used different tools out there for this process.
One time I placed verts around on the surface and then created polys out of those verts (or basically detaching off key verts). I donāt really recommend that. I ended up getting really lost in what I was trying to do and was creating planes out of the wrong ones 
- I trace over a āTrace Modelā. For instance on the Hoffman pic above, If I can, I will have a model of each chunk you see there. Upper Body, Legs, Shoes, Arms etcā¦ Then I will highly decimate whole subtools and bring them in in those same chunks. Then I polysurf over those chunks. My thought is no more than 400k triangles is good. And you dont need the full guy. often 1 arm and half the body etcā¦ works. My low poly will be like Orange while my Tracer models will be Blue. These trace models can be thrown away after your done if you really needed.
Everybody here has really great skills in getting things as low as possible. Its always a balance war there. A lot of my stuff is lower poly because its a common enemy and not seen in cinematics really. Or it doesnāt have a deformable face. So you try to offset anywhere you can and afford the polys for the good stuff. Then sometimes I have to go back in and run cuts around the upper shoulder area where the camera is angled. Iām known for making my legs too low poly so that when I see them in game the normals have a warble effect running around them. Wyeth catches me on those ;). The Armored Kantus was really difficult in the budget.
1 Like