Gee it's been a while. My absence can be put down to a few things, primarily moving house and working on art that I'm not allowed to reveal to the world. Also laziness. But even though I'm super busy I'm going to try and get this thing going again. And I'll be starting with a Mini 3D Art Challenge!
The guys over at gameartisans.org have some cool contests every now and then and this one seemed like fun. Having such strict guidelines makes it all the more enjoyable for me. My model can only consist of 1,250 triangles and I can only use a single 512x512 texture. This is around about on par with Nintendo DS graphics. The other guideline is you have to choose between one of six paths. These are Knight, Spy, Bard, Scribe, Wizard and Cleric. Obviously these are all fantasy characters and for whatever reason I was immediately drawn to the scribe.
I quickly found a character I liked and settled on the guy with a belt and a piece of parchment as a loin cloth. Another option was the dude with a paper skirt thing that is similar to those ads you sometimes see on billboards that have piano lessons and you rip of a piece of paper at the bottom with the phone number.
When I started modelling I noticed I had drawn the scribe with a slight curve. I knew I couldn't have him curve left of right and I definitely didn't want him to have parallel sides so I would have to decide if I wanted him to be fat or thin. Even though the fat guy would take up more real estate on the texture, I chose him because I imagine a scribe would be a well fed individual back in the day.
Here we have the initial model sitting at exactly 1,250 triangles. Problem is, the beard looks like crap and it makes the head look like its sitting upside down with the beard as the hair. I knew it couldn't stay like this.
At least this one didn't look like an upside down head, and because those spikes were triangular I was able to get a lot of them without taking up much detail. But it still looks bad.
Bam. Much better! I could have given the beard more detail if I kept it 2D, but I felt it was important to have depth so it is rather sharp edged. I could erase some triangles from the back of the beard and render my final image only from the front but I'd like to do this properly, as if it were going in a game.
Next post will be the texture work. I have to fit it all inside the 512x512 image so it will be quite low resolution. Hopefully it turns out well!
And here are some close ups. I'm particularly proud of the face, beard and chest.
And here is the render with the 512x512 texture. I still have to rig and position the scribe to submit it. That'll be next time!
