First Contact: Hero Face WIP 2 & 3

2) Ok so I've gotten more feedback and think I'm just about ready to move on to the rest of the body. The face is close. The upper eyelid shape needs some tweaking and the area around the mouth might need a little more fullness but now I need to move on to the rest of the character.

I thought I was far off until I checked by mapping a model's face on the character to see how my proportions were doing, some minor tweaking and its there.

3) Saw a bunch of things I already knew I wanted to fix so I didn't post just that 2 days ago. Went on to more tweaking. Fixed the not bridge height, and soften the cheek bones. Also obviously worked on the outfit body.

The body proportions are off from what I want, but I think I will tweak those on the game model... or not I guess we'll see. Its annoying to make big tweaks to the body b/c I'll lose details I painted in. 

First Contact: Hero WIP2

Got some great notes on polycount, "The nose bridge is to wide between the eyes, maybe that's what gives you an off spacing feeling. And the eyes-to-ears distance is a bit too big imo" -Texelion. A friend at work pointed out the jaw was forward by comparison to the forehead. 

So here is the result of that and some more tweaking on my own of course. Also stepped up a level in face detail. 

The jacket is just me sketching and messing around with ideas. I'll basically completely re-do it.
Right now I feel like she looks good front view but there is definitely something going on not quite right yet on the 3/4 view on the left.

First Contact: Hero WIP1

This is the hi poly version of a game character I'm working on. Star trek like world. I want her to be beautiful while not cliche game character sexy/sex symbol. I know that means a lot of fine tuning on the face(and lots of undoing hah) esp on the eyes.
Hi rez for promotion and for other images of her in game not obviously so much for the super low rez in game version she will eventually mostly be. Still learning a ton and tons more to learn. Everything still needs work as this is still early, but face and hair are getting there.

DOTA2: Chen update

I've being going back and forth on a lot of elements. Reading through the art guide again helped a lot. I actually removed some of the details, b/c the design was getting too noisy, the silhouette too messy, things were not working.

The lion/beast ears turned into horns. I took out the spikes I had in the gauntlets even tho those for a long time were the only thing I liked. They didn't work with the horns. The helmet face guard is now cleaner.

This is the first look at the staff. Its not there yet, but the idea is close to fleshed out. Trying to figure out how to end or connect the bottom of the horns.

 added a pad under the mount armor, otherwise pretty close to good to go.

DOTA2: Simple rigging/importing tutorial

A lot of people are having issues exporting clean models to the source engine. There are many got-cha's that can happen that I know from Unreal and can guess and prevent before we go into Source and hopefully save many hours of headaches.

First and easiest check that your model does not exceed the Triangle Limit

Skinning/Binding
1) Freeze Transforms
2) Delete History
3) Select the joints that you want to influence the object. *I would suggest to err on the side of less joints.
4) Skin>bind skin> smooth bind option box,
here are my smooth bind settings

5) Bind Skin
6) Paint Weights (caution a lot of model rigs get messed up b/c of this. Its both maya's fault and the engines. I'll do another tutorial for painting weights game safe later)

Exporting
Select Object export selection, FBX.
here are my FBX settings

click image to enlarge

Each object needs all 4 texture passes (masks link to mask guide)

• "whatever_color.tga", 
• "whatever_normal.tga"
• "whatever_mask1.tga"
• "whatever_mask2.tga"

I like to put them all in a folder w/ nothing else in there

         e.g. maya/textures/hero_name/arm/

The upload should be self explanatory

The only got-cha I found here is to change the name of the OUTPUT FILENAME everytime you make a change. I'm sure this will get fixed but for now, do it. 

A little more info, every time you run the IMPORT it builds a new folder here:

~.\Steam\steamapps\common\dota 2 beta\content\dota

            \models\items\phantom_lancer\random\outputFileName"

            \materialsrc\models\items\phantom_lancer\random\outputFileName"

every time you change the name it makes a new folder. Other people like to delete these folders every time you have to do a rebuild and you can keep the name. Either works I think. 

Lastly I want to say after all that, there are many got-cha's left hidden. And that's why there's a job called, some variation of, a Technical Artist (or sometimes just a Rigger) who's spends all their time learning and figuring out all the problems that can go wrong.

DOTA2: Phantom Lancer Spear Updated

Most of the criticism I got on my set was overwhelmingly on the spear. I agreed with a lot of the comments and wished I had heard some before. Well I've been sketching some ideas and finally honed in on this. I've updated the set with it and now consider it finished.

collection can be found here 

DOTA2: Chen Helmet Hi

Well its been going slowly, but every step I continue to refine my understanding of the process. I've been sloppy by comparison to the ideal way to work. I'm continuing to learn how and why to work the way you read about. I was bouncing between LOD0(in game hi) and LOD1(in game lo) THEN trying to make a baking high rez mesh. Thats a slow way to work, with a lot of tweaking that gets redone over and over. Here's the high rez mesh for the helmet, now I'll make the other levels of detail from this (duh) hah.

Edit Some Alt versions to break up or change the cross b/c its too symbolic and the symbolism doesn't really match.