Uruk Hai -WIP

[leigh]

Well, you are off to a good start :)

However, could I suggest that before you proceed, you make some alterations to your lighting setup, because right now your lighting is doing no justice to your model. I recommend using at least a 3 point studio style lighting setup (one key light, one fill light and one back light) to light this. This type of setup will illuminate your model adequately, and will help you to see all the details that you are creating.

Do a Google search on CG lighting techniques - knowing a bit about it can really help to boost the realism and effectiveness of your renders. And remember that since texturing is essentially defining the manners in which light reacts to your models surface, ensuring that you have a decent lighting setup is extremely important for the texturing process.

Now onto texturing...

Your skin colour seems to be wrong. The majority of Uruks I have seen have skin that is more reddish, not green. Check out the Lord Of The Rings (http://www.lordoftherings.net) site and look at their wallpaper section. There is a cool pic of Lurtz there, and you can get some great colour samples for his skin. Your Uruks colouring is too orc-like.

While on the subject of the colour map, overall it's looking too blotchy. Is it procedural? Because the colour variations are too strong and too pattern like.

You need more gloss, because the skin looks too dry. When they were filming LOTR, they used loads of petroleum jelly on the latex masks to make them look all slimey and sticky - pumping up your gloss amounts, and even giving it some reflection will increase this look on your model.

The paint on the face needs to look different to the rest of the textures not only colourwise. Paint has different specular and reflection properties to skin, and should also appear raised off the skin. It looks like you have added a slight bump map to it, but I think you need more definition to it, especially around the edges.

Your eyes appear to be plain solid spheres, which makes them look flat. Modelling the eyes correctly, with seperate lenses really helps to give depth to eyes. And since eyes are usually the first thing that we look at on any character, one has to ensure that they have a good degree of realism.

Also on the modelling side, I think the ears should be slightly larger.

Hope this helps :)

[manfriday]

that was incredibly helpful leigh! thanks!
Im actualy using a lightkit larry schultz created... maybe i am not understanding how to set it up properly

[manfriday]

bah! im starting his texturing over from scratch.
I couldnt find much on the offical LOTR website,
but I did find a butt-load of pics here:

http://www.spydirweb.com/pictures1.htm

in case anyone is interested.

:)

thanks for your help Leigh. Your a benevolent texturing Godess.

[leigh]

Here are some tips for lighting :)

- use a spot as a backlight, and set it to blue. Have it's intensity around 50% or so.

- use an area light as a key light, set to around 60 - 70% brightness. Keep it white, and place it above the character.

- create a fill light somewhere off to the one side on the front. Spots work well as fill lights. Changing the colours of your fill lights can really enhance the character. Making them red makes your characters look really menacing ;)

This is very basic, of course. Feel free to add another fill light or two as well.

As for the texturing, if you need more references, let me know - I have a DVD drive on my computer, so I can grab references fromthe film really easily ;) Those are cool refs you found though.

A question - how are you going to do his hair? Since the uruks kinda have dreadlocky hair, you could probably just model it :) I think you should consider giving him hair quite soon, as it will really improve his appearance.

[manfriday]

lol funny you should mention hair..

I tried using sasquatch with long hair guides..
I used three interwined splines and copied them around the head
to create the locks..
unfortunatye he came out looking alot like Rick James...

http://www.jay-sun.com/uruk_hair.jpg

I thought briefly about doing a lip sync animation to the song "SuperFreak"

heh

I actualy did come up with some better looking hair renders. . but it was still never quite right. I was gonna try making the intertwined splines a little "tighter", and increase the frizz to see if I could get rid if the cornrow look.
But hey.. im a total newbie to sasquatch too.. I have no idea how to do any of this stuff. heh.

[manfriday]

on the off chance that you are interested in seeing how I am doing these hair guides...

http://www.jay-sun.com/hairguides.jpg

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