Looking for some advice!!!

[Grayscale]

Kurt,
My suggestion is to go with the default gray one. If you use a textured one (and by your own accounts, not a great textured one) then it will become distracting and take away from your animation. No point in doing something that you aren't very good at, just to do it. Once your texturing skills improve, then I would slap some good textures on your character. I hope that helps you on your decision.

[ankheilw]

If you can get the gray one to look like what you are hoping to achieve, then the texture is jsut gravy on top of that. If you are going to move into animation, you need to find a way to breath life into your character, give them a spirit that exceeds the screen and makes a connection with the viewer.

SO, if you strip all you can from the model and work exclusively on the animation, pushing it until just a minimal framework expresses what you want it to, and then add back the detail, the finished product will be much better than if you just did the whole thing taking the texture into account. You can always twek at the end.

Good luck!

[KurtBoutilier]

Thanks so much for your replies .. I played a lot more with the textures, its looking better then the first one I posted.

I will just go into the animation part now and come back to the texturing later if I find it still needs something...

Thanks again, it really helps

Kurt

[adavies]

i reckon they both look nice, but one thing i might say is that you might want to think about whether you want to be an all-rounder or specialise in one area of 3D. nowadays studios are getting bigger so i would say that they tend to look for animators, modellers and environment people rather than a bunch of all-round artists. if it's for your own stuff then that's cool, but at the end of the day, if you model, texture and animate everything yourself, you're never going to do any of those as good as somebody who just animates or models and nothing else and they'll be the ones who get the job. having said that, it is handy to know the basics of these other disciplines as they might help improve your work, but in the long run i strongly advise that you focus on one area and you'll be amazed at how quickly you can learn and improve if you put the time in and dont spread yourself too thinly.

so, to answer your question :) it depends on your goal, do you want to be an all rounder?

[KurtBoutilier]

adavies, thanks.. modeling is my first love than animation...

[Gretsch]

adavies beat me to the punch :)
Great you answered a very important question. You want to be a modeler. So you need to show how your model deforms to the blendshapes you create with it. A full animation isn't really necesary in this regard if you feel your animtion skills aren't up to par (bad animation will pull attention away from your model) you can simply animate a select number of blendshapes on and off. But when you create blendshapes, show off your model, see how hard you can push the shapes. Models that can acheive the general range of phonems and expressions, are pretty common. What is rare are models that can be pushed beyond an average stiff expression and look fluid (still fleshy and not plastic).

have fun

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