Actor Likeness Critique: Low Poly Model for an Older Game

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I've been at the tail end of some mod-work for the Source engine, adapting content based on the "Tremors" movie and TV series, and I've reached the point where I'm done with the movie monsters and decided to try my hand at creating one of the series' flagship human characters.

Burt Gummer, as played by Michael Gross.

Thing is, while I've done actual characters before, this was my first real push to model and texture the likeness of a living, breathing human being.


It's actually gone better than expected. The model is surprisingly functional in-engine, given this has been my first human character with eye-posing and working flexes that accommodate the engine's automated phoneme-generation. As you can tell, it's low-poly. I know it's NOTHING compared to what modern-games consider standard now, but I'm also modeling it to make it consistent with other Half Life 2 characters.

But as much as I THINK I managed to get his likeness down in some senses, I just feel there's some inadequacy here, and I can't put my finger one what's wrong exactly. The eyes shown are texture-based and dynamic textures produced by the game engine itself, hence the lack of them in the images rendered/captured from the modeling program. And without eyes, it looks generally fine, but once the eyes are there... something feels... off. And again, I'm not sure WHAT.

That, and the mouth/stache. I keep comparing between the actor and the model, but I'm not seeing what's wrong.

I COULD settle for this, but I want it to be as good as it can be, per my abilities.
 
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id bring the eyes in, and flatten the face from the side profile. I think that would kill alot of that alien eye look in the quarter view
 
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Bring the eyes "in"? Might need clarification.

And flatten what part? The side view is taken straight from a photograph, and honestly I think it's where the likeness is best.
 
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With this kind of polyflow you should be able to develop a really well silhouette based on the character. Try to shrink up the nose, fix the eyebrows, the mustache is a wrong shape, use photoshop or any 2D editor to do a drawover to see it. Backside of the neck has a way too flat polyflow, that should be more consistent and you can save a lot of polygons there, which you could use for a better silhouette in the 3/4 perspective. Like Nuttzy said just try to flat the face in the side view.


Well here is the drawover, but I believe this should help out a lot.


And there should a resource of how the source engine uses the morph targets. I remember I was doing those morph targets under certain sequence - like frame1 - open mouth and so on. You could try doing some and replacing already existing ones in engine so you could give him more personality.

Anyhow keep up the good work, pal!
 
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Ooh, now THAT's the sort of critique I was hoping to see! Seriously, looking back and forth between the model and references was driving me nuts...

Oh, no no, that's what I was saying; I GOT Source's phoneme-system to work with the model! It's fully functional, even tested in GMod to ensure it worked under numerous scene files with full dialogue.

...Which complicates things if I need to drastically alter the model's topology... Well, there's always skin-wrap.


[video=youtube;KcsLaSBWG9k]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcsLaSBWG9k[/video]

Here's both of my direct references for modeling, as well as a clip of the character for further context.

Like I said, I'm reluctant to alter the side-view, because I referenced this specific side-view image... and to "correct" that feels wrong to me. So before I do that, hopefully this sheds a better light onto the full picture.

I'm confused about the eyebrows... Are you saying the hairy part doesn't match where the brows themselves SHOULD be?

I'll see what I can do about the stache'. And you're saying the mouth is physically too wide? Again, I'll see what I can do... Looks tough, if only because I'm worried about messing up/stretching the UV's for the texture. I'm rather proud of the texture, and I REALLY don't want to have to scrap it if I don't have to, it took a TON of work. I know it's largely pieces of images taken and blended, but I tried to make a skin texture from scratch, and it just never looked right, whatever I did. It always seemed too flat and painted.

Lastly... I don't know how to minimize the places you mentioned poly-wise without a negative result. The hat, maybe, but the neck...

Thing is, without extra polys, the neck looked AWFUL when the head turned after it was rigged. The polys smoothed the transition, and ended up adding more detail to the face where it hadn't been before, because it felt cleaner to follow through the egdeloop instead of merging several into triangles into the face.

...It's likely for similar reasons that I under-detailed the nostrils. I just didn't know how to justify the extra polys while just ending the polyflow in triangles, it feels sloppy.
 
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Here you go -- if you managed to force me to turn on the photoshop then it must mean something. Well anyhow, if you wanted pointers here you go:
• the topology lacks support for various areas such as chin, eyebrows, nostrils;
• dense topology/too much of explainable polygons mainly in mouth/jaw areas -- it could be much more clean and maintain the silhouette or even improve it with the existing one; like you could use extra ring just to support and make the silhouette of the jaw more rounded instead having it blocky;
• dense neck topology - for animating you might consider using extra loops/rings, but for this kind of low poly character using such dense topology is not sufficient in any kind of terms -- especially when extra polygons deforms the mesh (in a bad way e.g. making if flat);
• like Nuttzy and myself mentioned before -- flat the face little more; I pointed the mistakes you did so you could see that the eyes and entire skull shape could use some refinement;

Other things I have mentioned on the picture.

Face modeling, especially when it comes to likeness area, requires a quite rigorous topology methods to follow in order to have full control of everything. Your mesh is quite well done, but there are mistakes that make it hard to follow and will make things much more complicate for yourself, take it vertex animating or even a skeleton rig. Like mentioned before, non-supported areas with certain loops or extra polygons (which are basically doing nothing) will just make it hard for you.



I hope this will help you out. Just try to make a copy of existing model and follow what I've said then you will be able to compare things and you shall see if it helps or not.
 
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Wow, I really appreciate the prompt, on-point responses, this is the kind of kick in the junk I need.

The eyes were flat because of how I saw the HL2 characters handled in Source. Their eyes aren't spheres, but attached flat meshes, and since Source's eye shader works a specific way I didn't want to give it something it couldn't handle. That, and I think when I tried a sphere proxy, I couldn't figure out where exactly to center the spheres in the head, or decide how big to actually make them. After that, I tried to make them match the eyelids I modeled, and it didn't work, I had to mold them around the eye, which looked wrong.

It doesn't help that there isn't really a resource that handles subtleties like this. The eyes are such an important thing to get right in any model, and yet tutorials and resources tend to glance over details like these. Not even a rule of thumb, just "now do this: it should be done if you did it right."
 
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I hope that will help you out. I figured out that eye balls might be done in specific way as I remember that was the case back in DBS days. Anyhow, eye ball is not a problem as there are other things you can work on right now and get the character to be very accurate to your expected result.
 
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Oh my god, I can't believe this... I feel like such a freaking DOLT, and worse, I don't know how it occurred.

So I went back to the Maya file I had just after I finished the texture originally, just the bust basically. Stripped it down, set up the image overlay you made to directly reference, and got the dimensions as close as possible between the image and model

Once I zero'd in, I noticed something... most of the side-on corrections you prescribed were already THERE.

The flatter-face, the position of the ears and sideburns... I'd THOUGHT that seemed really strange, to have messed up that badly with a DIRECT reference.


My god, look at that. Whatever happened, it's like the nose became a center point for some kind of whole-sale scaling distortion, and somehow it just warped all the features so the space didn't really change, but half of everything tried to bunch up towards the back of the head.

I can't believe I got all the way to making FLEXES for this thing and NEVER noticed this had occurred.

Now I'm not sure what happened. I ended up exporting the Maya model to Max for rigging and to prep for porting to Source. So it could have just happened on import... Or after using the skin modifier to rig it to the Valve skeleton, sometimes weird things happen when you parent or skin a model to bones... Argh! Great, now I need to figure out when this happened so I don't make it happen again THIS time.

EDIT:

ARGH! Wait, no! I'm just an idiot AGAIN. Double dumbass on me!

Again, because I'm an idiot, the original image comp I uploaded here included two copies of the 3/4 view in Max instead of one 3/4 and one side view. So, the only side-view you had to work with was the one taken from within the Half Life Model Viewer, and was only an eyeballed approximation of a side-view. This would explain the oddities, since they were the result of an imperfect, non-orthographic perspective.


THIS is the actual Max sideview taken from the orthographic viewport, and hopefully it serves as a MUCH more accurate representation.

Meanwhile, I'm gonna get some sleep after hunting down this self-imposed roadblock, and work on the other front-view corrections in the morning...

Oh, and likewise, any of the images posted that have his pupil in them are taken from the HLMV, and only as accurate as my own approximation. The ones without pupils, with gridlines on them, are ACTUALLY orthographic.
 
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Well, sorry I tried to read but now I don't get what the problems are. Well if you want just send me the file via PM (whether .obj format, .max or .fbx), because I mainly used 3dsmax for modeling and I will tweak it till my eyes see no problem. Just couple of things and you will see the difference easily afterwards.

p.s. if you want, you can include the textures too, I could do some edits so you will see the difference between. You can send either way a diffuse - let it be .jpg, .png or targa -- doesn't matter as long as I could set some fixes for you.

I could fix the topology and I assume that head uses zero of bones since Source engine handles face animations via morphs, nothing will get worse and you will just win more.
 
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Oh sorry. In short, the reason the side view looked like it was so off was because I took a screenshot of the exported model in the game engine, and it wasn't EXACTLY side-on, so the features looked screwy. I know it's still loaded with problems, but I had to figure out why the model didn't match.

Sure, I'll let you have a look, seriously, thanks!
 

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