Previously I had mentioned that Vince was in the rigging stages and would be ready to animate within the next day or two. Well... turned out that wasn't really the case.
Although rigging on Vince's body more or less finalized there were clearly some problems with his face. After running some tests with the facial setup it became apparent that any problem albeit minor, with the mesh, lighting, or textures were pretty obvious to many others who had seen Vince up to this point.
To make matters slightly worse, I was unfortunately well aware of the problems but wasn't trying my best to ignore them :/ . Well, as it goes anyone that paid attention was easily able to point out problems with the character which forced me to backtrack a few steps to make sure Vince was looking good. After all, if friends or family members could spot problematic areas with my character then surely any company looking to hire me would be able to point them out.
Enter Vince's Face. Although there were other areas that needed fixing, namely below the sleeves and minor parts of the body, the face had the most obvious faults. Closeups on the face would have not been an option as problems with the face would be more apparent.
As I've said before, the art style was directly inspired by Team Fortress 2. Similarly (at least I hope) to TF2, the areas of focus are in the the chest and face area. The lower half of Vince's body is darker with little detail which hopefully keep your eyes focused on the lighter values and details of shirt or face.
Ultimately this is the desired effect I'm looking for in regards to the viewer but any unsightly blemishes quickly become the area of focus even if the rest of the model looks fairly decent.
Above is a previously posted render of Vince. In this render the problems aren't very apparent due to the distance between the camera and the character but upon closer inspection one can see dark "cuts" just below the sleeves and a dark shadow just below the lower lip. At this distance I might have been able to get away with leaving everything as is but it would have led to some pretty uninteresting camera angles.
In the rigging phase these problematic areas are amplified somewhat due to the positions that force that area to become more visible. This is a low quality screen shot but you can still see dark spots between the fingers, more spots on his mustache, eyelids, and once again below the sleeves.
This was an early test for the facial setup that really the many areas that needed some attention. The dark regions around the mustache are hard to miss at this distance as well as the strange scaring along the nose,eyelid and dark shadow below the lower lip.
Another problem viewers had with the character were the eyebrows. Many mentioned that although they didn't look terrible by any means, they looked very painted on (because they were) and had very little depth to them.
This was direct problem with the model having no extra extruded geometry for the eyebrows and being in fact merely painted on. Simply extruding the area just enough to create the impression that the eyebrows are slightly elevated was a simple fix. While fixing problems with the mesh I also altered the mustached which was causing some odd clipping in some areas.
As I got closer to finalizing the face (again) I rendered out a few images starting with the first image on the left. Most of the problems have been ironed out but something still looked odd to me. The eyes, more specifically the eyelids.
Vince's right eyelids (your left) were very sharp and pointy, while his left eyelids (your right) looked a lot more natural after some adjustments. The profile render gives you a better idea of just how sharp his eyelids were. The final render shows Vince with adjusted eyelids and slightly reshaped eyes with blemishes gone.
Hopefully all these fixes make Vince more appealing as a character.
In the next episode: Vince's Body finally rigged!
P.S. Hi Adam.
