Agreed. There used to be so much modelling activity which went on. Hopefully we can restore that to some degree.

Trying out some sculpting with Mudbox on a character I made...
Kain from the Legacy of Kain series.

I'll just stick this right here...
But really, that looks great! Are you going to sculpt any other details into the actor's head and create a normal map out of them?

Yeah, that pic was just like the first few strokes and trying to get the hang of the program, been a very long time since I've used it. Only thing is it's tough to get a good hard edge result like in XSI where you can just mark hard edges. Might have to chamfer all the edges i want creased, re export and start over.
A little more detail, doing this really takes a lot of time, at least I have a Wacom.

Ah, yes. I find the Knife and Grab tools to be very helpful for hard edges.


I'm getting my tablet tomorrow!

Yeah I was trying those but I couldn't quite get the same volume as the low poly model, too much was lost when subdividing, sucks cause the head was turning out nice.

The pinch brush is really good to sharpen edges. I forgot the name of the brush(in ZBrush its Inflate)but there's one in Mudbox too which lets you add volume easily. Just try a few of the brushes. Its good to only increment subd levels by 1 or 2. Then add another pass, then subd again. Otherwise its possible that you loose a lot of detail/volume. Its easier to add/remove volume on a lower level, too.
I like the head btw.

Well what I did was just go back into XSI and bevel all the edges that I wanted to have a good crease with like 0.01 distance and re export. Also tried out those brushes, bulge and wax are the ones I think you're thinking of ANDE but the pinch one doesn't work so great just because it distorts things quite a bit, seems better to just start out with creased edges rather than trying to make them.

Knife tool while holding ctrl to invert actually seems to work better at making outer creases than pinch.

By re exporting after beveling the edges I wanted to be creased I'm actually further along than I was before, already re sculpted the head to the way it was before.

EDIT: Decided to go back and redo some of the UV maps since I merged the hair object with the body since it was hard to get a smooth transition after subdividing the mesh in mudbox.
Hopefully GF will use that student discount to get me the new PS for my b-day next month.

Forth Eorlingas!

Sweet models guys.

Worked on it this and last weekend. First time I actually baked something hard-edged and it turned out ok. The hands are just placeholders, the backpack is missing and I only put 1 hour into texturing. Currently sits at 5172 tris. There are some normal map problems because I mirrored most of the model(except helmet, face cloth thingy and the skirt). Wanted to see him in movement so I put him into UDK deathmatch... Comments/criticism?

That snowtrooper is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen (before this it was your Jawa). Hats off to you good sir.

Well, here is the beginning of the LJ-50 Concussion Rifle: It's for the Republic Commando Mod Anakin,Bob,AcaelusThorne and I are working on.
Comments/Criticism/Thoughts ?

ANDEWEGET wrote:Worked on it this and last weekend. First time I actually baked something hard-edged and it turned out ok. The hands are just placeholders, the backpack is missing and I only put 1 hour into texturing. Currently sits at 5172 tris. There are some normal map problems because I mirrored most of the model(except helmet, face cloth thingy and the skirt).

Hidden/Spoiler:

Wanted to see him in movement so I put him into UDK deathmatch...

Hidden/Spoiler:

Comments/criticism?

Very very nice my friend, we are meeting polycount high standards right there! One of your best model with your stormtrooper, will you finish that one also? And is it rendered in Marmoset? And do you plan to put it in swbf2 ?

That snowtrooper is nice.

Cool tidbit: ANDE used the same exact basemesh that I did for my N7 armor.

The model looks awesome ANDE! Keep up the great work!

Also, what was your workflow? Did you sculpt the armor alongside the cloth parts in zbrush or did you sub-d model it in another 3D package?

The conc rifle is amazing! I am alightley disapointed though, because I have been working on a republic commando Mod as well, but have been inhibited by my inability to model weapons. Looks as though we may be haveing the same Ideas....

Still, I have a suggestion for your mod if interested.... I have been developing a new game mode for the Commandos called "Black Opps"....

can you tell us your idea via pm? send to Anakin, bob, webster27 and AcaelusThorne

Thanks!
@Lephenix: I don't think that Stormtrooper will ever make it into a game-ready model. I render all my characters in Marmoset, XSI doesn't have a good looking realtime shader and rendering single frames every time I make a change to the texture takes way too long. If I could edit the skeleton as easily as I could UDK's then I would put it into SWBF2, but right now I'm too lazy to get the pose into the T-pose.

@TNA: I used the lowman_shoes from the polycount wiki. Before this model I used to sculpt my character base for anatomy/size reference every time from a really low-rez, ugly base mesh. Every character had different size and anatomy so I would have had to create a unique skeleton for each character. Now I just base all characters of the lowman.
I sub-d-modelled the armor in XSI(alongside with the cloth base meshes). The cloth I sculpted in ZB and baked both, cloth and armor, in xNormal. The cloth low I did in Topogun, the armor low in XSI. Hardsurface sculpting is something I wanted to learn for a long time though. I'm not very good at hard surface modelling and baking(I'm too lazy to spend hpurs on getting the baking cage right and just end up painting some normals in PS)so sculpting the hard surface stuff at least takes away the modelling.

Makes me want to try to update the unit models of this game considering that it supports normal mapping which could greatly increase detail.

Seeing that also made me want to work on this more