Hi everyone. Here is my New Republic trooper, based on the Star Wars: Invasion comics. The mesh is based on the Phase I clone model, with some heavy changes and of course a brand new texture. Still have to do normal and specular mapping, but otherwise I'm pretty happy with it.
What do you think?

Looks pretty interesting. Almost like an astronaut of sorts. You plan on doing a variant with the visor down?

As a matter of fact, yes. Also, here's one of the pictures I used for reference.



These guys get drawn differently from frame to frame in the comics, so it was hard to nail down the exact design of the armour, but I think it turned out okay.

Wow Jedimoose that unit looks amazing!! Great job!

Alright, I've finished the normal/specular mapping on the New Republic soldier... and...

I also created several other classes - so I now have the standard Trooper/Heavy/Sniper/Engineer/Officer/Special setup complete. I'm not including the Officer or the 'Special' class here yet - the officer looks pretty similar to the trooper but with a kama and different markings, and the special unit will be included in its own unique post due to how much work I put into it (plus it's not quite ready).

Here are some pictures for your viewing pleasure:

Trooper Vanguard Sniper Engineer Let me know what you think!

If nothing else they look different and interesting. Nice job.

Hey, thanks for the feedback. Do you have any suggestions for improving the quality?

Upping the poly count, making things more smooth and round (especially the armor like the greaves, elbow pads, pauldrons, and boots). You don't need to limit your models to 2500k polygons, for units you can easily push them to 5k.

They look awesome.
But in my opinion it might look better if there are more polys. It looks a little bit like in minecraft because of the shadows on the arms. An other thing might be to add a little bit more detail into the white and blue parts of the texture. There are too many empty (textured) parts in my opinion. What I want to say is the armor looks too clean. In the reference you showed there was more dirt on the armor. Or any other detailed things.

But all in all I really like these units. Especially the helmets and the tanks on their backs. Have never seen that before.
One more tip might be to reduce down the glowing visor. I like the glowing, but you can't the his face anymore, because it brights to brightly (in my opinion).
But good job on this.

Okay guys, I spent the weekend working on these units and I think they look much better. Thanks for the feedback. I still have a couple things I want to tweak - specifically the sniper's visor glow, which is now too low, and some parts of the normal maps. I'm still open to suggestions if anyone has any.

Here's a brief updated photo collection: The last two are the officer unit.

It's definitely a lot better. I'd try making the wrists a little bit better, you'll see them a lot between the selection screen and other places.

Thanks for bringing that up. I didn't notice the awkwardness of the wrists until just now. I'll work on that. Any other suggestions that you can think of?

I'd tone down the specular a little bit. I know it's white armor, but even white armor doesn't reflect that much light. It's reflecting light as if it was polished aluminium right now. Real armor would have coatings to reduce reflectivity. In real life, being reflective in a warzone is bad.

The blue clothes look a bit, bland. It's hard for me to criticize it, since I'd be unlikely to do any better myself since I'm awful with cloth, but I'd try and make the cloth texture darker in appropriate places. Look at the stock rebels to get some ideas for cloth.

You're right.

My inability to decide whether the blue part is armour-like/chitinous exoskeleton, or cloth jumpsuit is crippling me here. Here's the struggle: these characters are drawn quite differently throughout the Invasion comics - even on the same page, in different frames they can look very different. So I've had to make compromises and combine different ideas into the models.
This problem includes the entirety of the blue part of the character. Here are some of the references from the comics that I've been using ((C) 2011, 2012 Dark Horse Books/Lucasfilm & Dark Horse Comics). As you can see, the first two definitely look like the blue parts are cloth, while the last two are some kind of light armour.
So I guess I just need to buckle down and commit to choosing one or the other.

From a logical standpoint, a thick fabric makes more sense here. Maybe with a light armor mesh underneath, not that you'd see this.

Hard to turn my brain off with these things. I always have to try and make armor seem functional and realistic if possible.

If it was some form of armor, it'd be cumbersome and near impossible to move with the way it's designed.

I think it might be totally finished now! I extracted all of the 'blue' polygons and made them their own polymesh, used GATOR to transfer the envelope weights from the old model, completely redid the UVs, and hand-painted a new cloth texture for the jumpsuit. I tried to make it as realistic as possible by including seams where they would normally appear on clothes. And then I used a tiled kevlar weave texture on 'soft light' to add some detail. Threw on a normal map and tweaked the specular, and I think it looks pretty great now.
I also dropped the specular on the white armour.

So without further ado: Now all that's left is to copy these changes to the other units, and wait 20 minutes for them to munge.

wow jedimoose that looks really good! The cloth looks great with that normalmap!

re:the new fabric.

out of 10.

milehighguy: Thanks! I am very happy with how the normal map brought out the Kevlar look and feel just the right amount.

Wulfman: Yessss! And thanks for the support/ideas/feedback.