Acumen

thought I could post the results of a little contest me and a friend of mine had in the past week over in a forum (german one - so sry for some of the writings on the concept - couldn't really translate that ^^) and so I thought I could share the results with you guys the goal was to model anything that fits in a "bicyle" theme with a polygon budget of 2750. labers concept: acumen (tahts me) concept: so we had 2 days to do the concepting and modeling and I can tell you this was a lot of fun this is what we came up with in the end: laber's model (2478 triangles): acumen's (tahts me again) model (2750 triangles):

that is an awesome improvement. if your compare the beginnings of this model and now you got a pretty dense mesh. great work you did there ! i mean you got the budget of 5000 and as far as I can tell from the concept, there wasn't much detail you could add, so your only goal was to achieve a nice and smooth mesh. and the result is soo much better than what you got on the start. It's consistent now and I think you became a lot more conscious of how to place and distribute these polies so that you get a dense mesh in the end. I'm really looking forward to your next model The 2 rows of the upper leg could be rotated cause they face against the structure of the leg again. The chest looks very wide in the side view, yes (because the arms are so skinny) but that takes 3 minutes to fix this, right ? Move the back in a bit, move the chest in a bit and fiddle around the ass as well and it's done.

Well I just think it's not quite balanced out, yet. For example you have all those wrinkles on the face going on but then again on the back and the chest area you save your polies as if this is gonna be a 1000 polygon model. It needs to be more consistent. here's an example of how the shoulders could wrap around, though of course it uses much more polygons than you should end up having on your model but I think it's a good example for the whole shoulder area. The nice thing is, that you can take this as a guidline and cut off entire polyrows in order to achieve your budget: http://v091259.dd2110.kasserver.com/tem ... r_body.jpg And here i painted in, what I was talking about before. If you add those extra polies on the back and the chest it will look much smoother. I mean those are really visible areas. If you have 10 rows on hand wrinkle this is something you won't really notice, but the torso is such a huge object, why would you want to save polies there, when you have 5000 polygons overall to spend on the entire model http://v091259.dd2110.kasserver.com/tem ... rpaint.jpg I just think you have many hard edges, where the edgeflow changes drastically and goes in another direction and your model is not benefiting from it at all.

yup looks much better now. especially with the torso underneath ^^ the wrinkles are not necessary, though. You said you got a 5000ish budget, so you just don't need that. Same goes for these tiny tiny splits on the ripcage. You need to spend your polies a bit better, like instead on those splits you could use these polygons much better on the shoulder area, which is just a simple extrusion right now. You should have much more rings in this region in order to make animating that easy. Have a look at that model: http://www.bobotheseal.com/portfolio/Co ... monk01.jpg You should have at least 3 rings for animation issues, when you workin in such a high polygon range. You can it on the red concept how the shoulder should wrap around instead of being just a simple straight extrusion. It will not only make your model look better but also make animating a lot easier. With 5000 polygons you need to worry pretty much about the right anatomy or at least get the shapes a more dynamic look..

maybe one of these heads in here can help you improve your edgeflow: http://boards.polycount.net/showflat.ph ... n=0&page=3 I'd suggest you really study some head model renders in forums like cgchat or cgtalk. This can really help alot. It just doesn't look right, right now ,sry :/ Especially the nose and mouth areas can be improved a lot. The biggest problem i see, is that you haven't really decided whether you'll go for a complete hipoly head or keep it lowpoly in the end. Because at this point I think the wrinkles you put here and there really giving you a hard time making this into a clean head mesh. I'd add the important features first and get those right. Afterwards you can go all crazy on the wrinkles. maybe this overpaint helps ? I don't even know if that makes any sense All I can say is that I hate modeling heads. It takes me so long do one and I'm never satisfied with the results. So I was just trying to explain the way how I'm trying to improve on this issue. I really hate modeling heads - wasted so many hours and still quite figured it out. I guess no video tutorial on earth can help you there. It's just practise, practise, practise

mh, you should really try sitting down and work on your edgeflow and the overall poly distribution. all throughout your last models the faces have been quite messy and now on this closeup it becomes really clear. it starts on the forehead, that von*ferret mentioned, goes on to the eyes/nose area. You can tell by the smoothing around the nose that the transition is way to harsh. You should really look at some other heads and try to improve on this, cause this will contribute to 300% better models. Cause animating, uvmapping, skinning and whatnot will become much easier. Redirecting edges and stuff will be really helpful.

woot \o/ bestest day in a long time pretty graphics everywhere. I'm so glad this is finally back. Bestest forum to browse and sometimes even post in ^^

nope, didn't start this guy, but actually he really IS next on my model list Cause this tankbuster guy has such a bad perspective, that'll take more time to do. I hope the next concepts have a more fabi-friendly pose and actually have some feet I have to do the uv for signurai first, though hate it (i really need to get my name changed here think I'll mail mikezilla again for this)

you really have used 1000 triangles for this head ? If so, thats really not well distributed. head should be like 500 regarding the polycount and sometimes edgy look of the body. thats really a bit over the top. If you wouldn't have told that, I'd have said "nice model and texture, whats the poycount". You can't really see 1000 triangles in the entire face O_O Thats really too much and I can't imagine where you put all these polies, so thats quite a point to crit for me, sry :/ polyt distribution could be a lot better then...

alright, postman said I could post here as well. These are 2 models I did for Wasteland HL2. The first one is a sniper (that's what they told me) and the second one is some weird guy, didn't really figure out what his armor was in the first place, until postman told me Anyways, hope you like them

hehe, alright. Though I didn't really customize Max that much. If I should ever be bored again, I'll try to copy&paste my old settings back and forth to see, what was wrong but I don't think that'll happen in this decade

I don't know why I'm always messing things up like that in Max. Some weird talent or something. But thank god, your tip with deleting the ini-file worked. \o/ Thank you sooo much. On the next start the render dialog was totally on the right side but I could grab it and re-center it to the screen. Now I can continue working. *wuhu* thanks again ^^

so yesterday another genius thing happened to me. I was just about to render this character model but I couldn't "find" the render menu. It's sooo weird. I can access all the other menus like "Materials" and stuff. So no matter whether I click the F10 key or just click on "Render" in the menu I cannot see the render dialog. I resetted the UI and it's still not there. So right now I think I either clicked a key that somehow "locked" this render dialog or made it somewhat "invisible" Or another thing that I could imagine, that I somehow managed to simply move this menu out of the screen. So I really hope that someone can help me out there, it's really weird to not being able to render anymore, except from the F9 Quick Render function. Really weird to not have this menu on the screen. Maybe there really is some weird shortcut that can reset the menu position or anything. I don't know

Looks like your smoothing groups are a bit messed up.. The model itself looks likes its cut out of a wooden plate, it works ok in the side view but 2/3 and front view looks a bit "extruded" especially the beak looks very flat and not too organic. basically the entire middle part is flat. I'd add another row of vertices there and get rid of some that are used in the body without defining the actual shape of it any further. The beak should also be seperated more visibly from the head, as well as the wings from the body.

what's the point ? Come on good sirs. Whatever you did in the first place, may it be mapping, texturing, whatever. What do you expect from posting such models that are done in 10 minutes ? There's nothing to crit at all Just spend the time you need for making such threads on the the next model and post something really nice... I mean no offense, but its a simple can. What would you like to hear ? I mean obviously you understood the basic features. Why don't you use this knowledge to do an object that consists of more than a simple cylinder shape thing and a grip ? That wouldn't be too hard for you at all.. If someone posts his first map here, people go all mad, but the model forum gets full with these "lookie, its my first model threads". You guys know how to use to tool, why don't you make something more interesting out of it. sry, that I used your thread for saying this, but you were just the one on the top @reno: well you are actually doing textures and stuff, and you can actually see the progress. thats a good way of doing it and there's nothing wrong with that. Just wanted to push the others a bit, cause they know how things work and...

um, why exactly did you made the "axis" that round and detailed and the REAL wheel that blocky ? You should do it just the other way round, otherwise it wouldn't make too much sense to me. You have tons of polies on the inner element but which you could easily spend on the actual wheel shape, which would look much much better in the end, then.

yeah, the forehead uses a couple of unneede polies there. but I really like all the concepts you have there they have such a cool style. and you did really well on the poly distribution on this model, except from the face, like DanielAragon said. What looked weird to me, was the nose. Does it really have that many polies or did my eyes just trick me there ? Cause the wireframe looks like there are quite some polygons in there, especially on the front side of it. But I guess my eyes really just tricked me ^^ Overall a great job \o/

just try both O_O Give yourself 1 week for each program and try achieving the same things/objects in both application. you can't say that one of the programs is better, cause everyone has a different working method. Who cares, what other people think about a modeling prog you use, as long as you can make superb results with it. 2 weeks are not too long, right ? Just give yourself these extra-weeks and you'll see what programm suits your needs the best. I only worked with Milkshape and Max so far, so I can't judge maya at all, but if it would be thaaaat bad, it wouldn't be updated still, right ? People use both progs and get stunning results, in the end its the artist who makes the models, not the programm. Its just your digital tool, not some magical box or anything. I don't think you should listen to anyone's advise about which program to prefer. Maybe one of the things has THE key feature you always wanted to have or you really need for modeling, while someone else says "why would I need that, I'm better off this way". A friend of mine and myself we switched from Milkshape to Max (me) and Maya (him) at the same time and it took us both about 3-4 weeks to get used to it and now there's no such thing like "oh i can model twice as fast and soo much better than you, just because of the program". It's all a matter of practise. Once you get used to one of these progs, it takes about 3-4 weeks to switch again. They both have hi and lowpoly modeling techniques, there are certain things that max does better and then there are things maya is superior to max - but thats all in the eye of the user. There are people on polycount doing excellent models in Maya and then there are people using Max creating awesome stuff. In the end of the day, it doesn't matter. The only thing that would be any issue is the number of availabe exporters, in case you are talking about game art modeling. You should clear things up, whether there are any exporters out there or not. But that's about it. Really, just try them and you should see what fits your needs better and what not. Hope that made any sense

ah, ok. always wanted to massage someones feet but thats a pretty neat offer. I hope some talented people in here get chosen. Would be cool to hear. *goesondreaming* I'll practise my coffee making skills then and one day, who knows, I might be getting an intern as well \o/ but thanks for the info, finally I know that that term means. Always wondered what that was all about.

*cough*whats an intern btw, anyways ?*cough* What do interns do. Is it like a "Praktikant" ? like, does he say "ok, look, this is what I can do and what I did so far. Can I come to your office and teach me tons of new stuff so I get really good at it and you give me the chance to work as a full time employee" Or how could the work of an inter be described ?

but i can't skin them /o\ d'oh i think 2.4% of my models did ever get past being modeled and having a uvmap. Maybe I should start saving some money and pay people for skinning them sounds good to me ^^ thanks, anyways for your comments, guys. I think these were the last models that I might have been doing "just for fun" for quite some time. /o\ mod work is next on the list. but its for a mod I like, so its all good oh btw, I saw this on another forum. there was this concept and the task to model the room with a budget of 30.000 and texture. Well since I can't texture I just modeled it I'm at 28.756 well, of course without texturing it says nothing, cause anyone could do it ^^ that was the ref btw: http://v091259.dd2110.kasserver.com/tem ... oncept.jpg

mh, did these models in the past 3 days and thought I could post them in here. Not for any mods. Can you believe how good that feels to not be forced to model something and just do something cause you want to soooo good \o/ dark knight has 3786 and the archer has 3538 triangles. the thing about the archer..well originally I wanted to model the supercool kevin costner robin hood but then I didn't find enough refpics in time and so I decided to go differently on it, sadly. But I might wanna try to do this in the future, we'll see oh and btw, thanks again for all these comments on this marine thinigie, I realized pretty much all of your suggestions on the head and helmet. great help from you guys \o Wire: http://v091259.dd2110.kasserver.com/mod ... _wire2.jpg Smooth: Wire: http://v091259.dd2110.kasserver.com/mod ... _wire2.jpg Smooth:

now that looks much cleaner and organized \o/ I like it a lot with the changes you made. Good job

woa these fingers O_o do you really think you should put that many segments in them ? That looks really weird, thinking of this model in general being pretty lowpoly. And I don't think too many people will notice all these little segments visually but perfomance-wise ^^ One thing I also noticed on this and your last model, is that the legs always have these totally straight segments, that doesn't benefit to the model, imo :/ poopinmymouth referred to this naming it tube syndrome With changing that your model would look much much better, as the edgeflow would be greatly improved, with just rotating and moving some existing vertices. Also all these segments in the ellbow area could be moved and changed around a bit, so that the shoulder area gets some nice segments for deformation, as well. 3 rows for the ellbow should be more than enough so you can easily move the upper 2 of these 5 ellbow sections to the shoulder to shape it a bit more and alos make it easier for animation. You can also cut away 2-3 vertical rows on the "hood" cause they don't really add anything to the overall shape and you can put these save polies, like, in the boots to give them a nicer shape or in the eyes, cause they are really rounded on the model sheet but rather blocky on the model and going inwards instead of outwards. mh, maybe thats a bit too much :/ sry, didn't wanna sound offensive or anything, but the model is really good and those are just some minor changes, that should be worth realizing, before you head over to uvmapping, though i can imagine, you already finished doing so so just ignore my post ^^

Hm, finished this guy today (started yesterday) - he comes in with about 4500 polies. Though I might have cut away some polies here and there I kinda based this on some refpics from ghost recon 2 and it had about the same detail with a 4,700 ish polycount, so I'm not too concerned about that. It was just modeled "for fun" so I don't think there's a chance of getting this skinned or anything Anyways, was fun modeling this gentleman, I think it might be a marine, though I'm not too good at these military things ^^