JorisCeoen - Personal Replica (Character)

Hello everyone, I'm very excited participating at this contest which is a brand new subject across the usual stuff.

I had a long time been wanting to actually create and texture character, rig them and actually play with them in any Source game. I just couldn't find the time or motivation doing so, but when I saw this contest I just thought that it's really something important to do as modeller and something that people expect you to have as skill, especially because I have had countless of request on doing playerskins and I always had to decline.

That's really about it. Here follows all information:

Personal model

I though that the best way to start making a character is to rebld yourself. After all, as character I know my own body the best and I have all the materials by hand (literally :P).

I had to read and watch through countless of tutorial until I found this very good one that got me on the way to do it. It takes a long time getting through all the videos, but in the end it's worth it all!

I also had to learn texturing organic stuff but that was not all too difficult if you have already everything you need to work on. I used the method of recreating a mesh based on a reference photo. I know that some other professional modellers told me that I should do it on the feel, which I will, but for starting I went with that tutorial instead and it definitly worked, but took long, so next time I'll try it differently.

I was forced however, to adapt my own body propertions for it to match the skeleton of the CS:S Urban model (and no, it's not what you think that I had to adapt xD).

In the end I'm happy with the result. The rig is good, the texture is good and the model is alright. It's obviously not on a professional level but then again, I just started and it was very interesting. This contest has encouraged me to learn something new, and I am willing to progress further on this particular aspect of modelling so that one day I could start making my own characters out of imagination and use them in games or levels!

The game

It's for Counter-Strike: Source and will replace the Urban CT. Why? I though urban, which means city, which is closest to a normal person, which is what led me to decompile that model.

Future updates

The mesh has been fully optimized to only render that what is necessary. These are the fixes over version 01:

• No unnecessary mesh rendering anymore, what you see is what you get.
• Reduced the polycount and improved with meshtweaking.
• Improved considerably the rigging which is much more accurate now. No clipping anymore and holes/gaps have been covered for more realism.
• Added Phong with the correct bumpmap settings this time!
• Different compression settings for the materials.
• Diffuse changes for some colors and little UnwrapUVW tweaks.

Any feedback is highly apprectiated!

Model & texture stats

Model

• 4.928 polys
• 4.941 verts
• 654kb

Materials

• 2048x2048 for diffuse and normal map (original file is 4096x4096. Any personal interest of anyone wanting that size is free to PM me)
• 2x 21mb for all material files together
• ARGB8888 for diffuse and RGBA8888 for normal
• Phong map in alphachannel of the normal map