I've been inspired to start one of these. I am attempting to do one sculpt everyday for 90 days. I haven't participated in sculpt January before so I grabbed the calendars from the last 2 years and will be doing those this month and next and then participating come January. I am hoping this will be a good place to post for feedback. I won't post all of them probably, but the ones I really want feedback on I will. Here is the male portrait sculpt. Feedback definitely appreciated. Anatomy isn't my strong suit, and I am really trying to push my learning there especially:
pprocyonlotor Yeah I thought the back one was supposed to blend in but the color of the hydra seems like a warmer green (closer to yellow on the rgb color wheel) which doesn't provide much contrast. Maybe that's partly because of lighting. If the hydra were a cooler green (closer to blue) you'd have more color contrast between the background and the hydra. Bottom right of the screen is blue which partly does the job but if you consider the head there blends in to the background like the back one, it doesn't seem enough. Placing the blue light towards the front head and tweaking it's size/strength could also do the job. There might be some other way to think about this or an easier way to make it better but my understanding of color is rudimentary.
Also, thanks! :D
pprocyonlotor It seems like you're going in the right direction. The light source on the left side seems stronger and hydra seems dimmer. I don't know how would you make the hydra pop out other than just trying out lots of different lighting setups :D
The details on the mouth and the tongue and the saliva certainly add character.
Here is the game that our team made in the month of January: Itadaki Master
You can play it by clicking on the link on the top right of the page. The basic narrative is you play as Yamada Sensei who has stolen the food of the gods and returned to your moutain cottage to enjoy your divine feast, but the gods have sent their furious tengu to thwart your lunch and prevent you from ascending to the divine realm. You have to eat the mochi on your plate while managing to fend off the tengu.
I was the sole artist on the game, so everything visual was up to me, though it looks like a couple of bugs showed up in the final project that weren't there when I test played it (the lighting isn't displaying properly and something weird is happening with the tengu's hand in the punch animation... oh well). It was a lot of fun to make, so please take a minute or two to go play it. Feedback is welcome, though keep in mind it was made in a month, so it's pretty bare bones and I'm well aware of many of it's flaws, but I'd still love to hear what you think :)
jgonzalez One of the problems I never came up with a satisfactory solution to was how to set up a first person character model so that the arms and torso work in concert with the camera. If you have any input on that I would love to hear it.
pprocyonlotor When it comes to first person, most games use two different models. I like to refer to how Destiny approached this: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022298/The-Art-of-First-Person as it gives you a good idea of how it's usually done and they do a great job of this. Essentially the arms and head are separate in the first person view, and the third person view is the entire body.
I've also see a hybrid of this in the UFPS where the the full body is used, but the upper body is "masked" out with a transparent shader and the first person arms are placed on top of the body to match. This allows them to have the fully body animated with the first person upper body and the third person legs. It looks a bit weird in movement, but it's a solution.
Hey there! I just played the game and I must say I like the idea behind it! Fighting off Tengu while eating mochi is hilarious. I also liked the music very much! It adds a good tension to the game.
Did you mean the yellowish glitter mainly around the tengus wings when you talked about lightning issues? The rest looked fine to me.
The only thing I would suggest: Make the "Game Over" and "Player wins!" bigger. They were really hard to see and maybe make the game stop when you win or loose
@fide Thanks! Are you getting the yellow glitter? That's so interesting because I wasn't getting that when I played the webGL last night, but it did appear in the VR build. It's another thing that didn't show up in the Unity project, though. It's caused by the dissolve effect on the shader overlapping transparency in the UVs, and I don't know enough about shaders to know where to begin to fix it. Thanks for playing and thanks for feedback!
jgonzalez Thanks for the video. It's good to know how the pros do it. I don't really know how to implement the masking and multiple cameras/overlays in Unity, but that at least lets me know what questions to be asking. For our next project, I am supposed to be making a beach scene, and I am puzzling over how to render the surf/waves. I should have access to shader forge this time around so that will help I think, but if you have any suggestions there also, I'm all ears.
pprocyonlotor I'll definitely will play it this weekend! I'll let you know what I think 😄
I don't know what kind of style your going for, but googling "sea shader unity" or "ocean shader unity" gave a couple of good results (YouTube videos as well as written tutorials), maybe there's something useful for you there 😊
pprocyonlotor You don't really need to mask anything. Honestly unless the game is multiplayer you probably don't need the full body unless you'd like to see your feet. If you wanted to mask anything you'd have to add different materials to different parts of the body in something like Blender. Then in Unity, change the shader for those materials to be transparent. If you were using it in multiplayer, you'd have the full body character on a different layer than the upper body, then your first person camera should be set to only render the upper body by changing the culling mask. Nonetheless you probably don't need all that if you're going for a single player game.
Water simulation in Unity would be done with shaders, but water shaders tend to be pretty complex. Depending on how realistic you want your water to look you can either get a water system from the asset store, or you could use some of the premade water prefabs Unity has. Adding foam and small waves can be done relatively easy with some vertex shaders. Here is a link to some good water tutorials with Shader Forge: https://nordeus.com/blog/art/50-shaders-of-forge-prototyping-with-shader-forge/
Get ready for some animations!! I've jumped into school at iAnimate, so I will be posting some assignments and other projects to get some extra eyes and feedback from the community here.
The tots animation again with a little more polish and a better camera:
This is great man! I'm excited to see how you progress through this.
Here is the polish pass on the tots exercise. Comments and criticism please.
I had to look this up, but after doing so, I think "doggy dishwasher" would be more fitting.
Did you create your name with that in mind? I knew that raccoons were in the family Procyonidae, but I had to look up the definition of lotor.
No. I knew it was the taxonomic ID for raccoon and I like raccoons. I also chose it as a starcraft username ages ago because I thought it sounded sci-fi ish and it sort of became a go to username for me.
This is looking great John. The cartoony style of it is really fun. The way he kind of swivels on his base to look at the rock at the end is well done as well.
In the first shot, his first few jumps have some spots where he's slowing down and speeding up, causing a bit of a stutter. If you frame by frame you'll notice there are a few frames while he is in the air on both the ball and the base where he barely moves, then continues to regular spacing. This could be YouTube and its compression, I'm not sure. The jumps in you're next shot are awesome.
I'm sure you had some time constraint and how many frames you could go to on this project. But at the end it would have been kinda cool if he had some kind of reaction or if he had a moment to notice he was floating just before he fell.
Overall great stuff man. Keep at it, I hope you share more.
Thanks phoenix4690 ! I do see the part you are talking about. The first jump does look better in maya than it ended up on youtube. The second jump could use some work. He doesn't travel forward very much so mid jump he feels a little too floaty. I could maybe reduce a frame or two. And I agree about the having a better take at the end. Thanks for the feedback. I intend to keep posting here at least once a week or so. Hopefully that will be enough to grab a few eyes for critique.
Walk cycle practice. Comments and criticism welcome. I used Christoph's Zelda rig.
