Power Suit Reforged

So I was playing Super Metroid the other day, which just happens to be my favorite video game ever. Then it dawned on me that I’ve never done a Samus fan design before. So, this is just a project that I might finish. Not sure what I’m going to do besides the character. Though I do want to make Samus as a base model with/without clothes, then make a suit that actually matches the proportions while still looking cool because normally the power suit has obscenely wide shoulders. Updates won’t be too regular because I’m doing college at the same time. Part of the reason I want to do this is because I haven’t used Marmoset or Quixel software in a long time and there’s been a whole bunch of new stuff in development related to physically based real time rendering and shaders that I want to learn. (might even dabble in a little Unreal 4 since I’ve got a license for it now.) I want it to not feel like the original game in so far as it’s perfect and polished and idealized. I want her to look worn and real, incorporating new elements to emphasize that. I’m not sure whether I only want to do a realtime level of detail or push into doing a full out render. I’ll be working with as high resolution textures and meshes as I can though.

Here’s what I have so far…
http://i.imgur.com/246G7hg.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Mhnj3nA.jpg

Reference I’m working with:

http://i.imgur.com/zJj6S5N.jpg

Noice to be back in the Blender community again! :slight_smile:

Attachments


Sculpted a stylized metroid last night as a warm up… might upload a commentated timelapse depending on if there’s interest in the process…

http://i.imgur.com/qWuMwNU.jpg

So here’s the final modeling sheet for Samus and a couple outfits. I thought I might vary the character a bit by making her a strawberry blonde with her hair up rather than a blonde with a long pony tail (though I can probably try both in a render). Left side is workout clothes, right is evening dress; thought about doing the baggy sweater I had in the previous sketch but I kinda wanted to see how a dress would look. (NSFW linework and painted body)


(yes I know, the hands and feet are weird, they’ll look much better sculpted).

I was thinking perhaps one of the renders could be a futuristic magazine cover that she interviewed with (hence the outfit ideas).

I’ll start working on the final suit concept and try to get it out as soon as possible, but I like to be able to improvise a little while I’m sculpting so it won’t be as detailed or finished looking as the modeling sheets.

So I’m back after a bit (was doing some more Metroid ‘research,’ and by that I mean beating Metroid Prime 2). I’ve come up with a final suite sketch. The way I do hard surface, it will probably change a bit by the time I’ve finished modeling. I also have the beginnings of Samus’s body mesh done. Are there any changes I should make proportion or anatomy wise before moving forward with details and sculpting the head? Does the suit sketch look more modern and feasible than the regular versions? Thanks! :smiley:

http://i.imgur.com/wYgR7hu.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/TBciYqA.jpg

Very cool concepting, nice work so far.

Thanks Craig!

Made some more progress on Samus herself. Need to do more fine detailing and finally do color, subsurface maps, and other stuff. Anyway, I finished up her face and broke up some of the forms with more realistic details and proportions. Any critiques so far?

View Body Sculpt (NSFW)

Well… excellent job so far.

No particular remarks on her shape; she looks like a strong woman, not like a twig. That’s a good choice IMO.

This is awesome! I like the idea of working within realtime/game constraints, and especially the use of Quixel! I don’t have much experience with anatomy, but I will say your figure looks feminine. Something about the legs looks off to me (the calves maybe?), but maybe it’s just my imagination, or the camera lens/angle.

Is there an official image of what Samus looks like under the suit, or has it always been individual artists’ interpretations?

Nice, I do a version of Samus as well with the zero suit but my style is anime due to simplicity.

Your work looks very good, the head is great and the body as well. It looks like you almost completed the work, I guess that adding some details and texturing you will have it ready very soon.

The mechanical suit might give you headache if you have not tried mechanical modeling so far. If you go for it make the first prototype version with speed modeling and putting various pieces together in the air, just to get some form. Then you might see how to combine the pieces with retopo or sculpting.

Let’s see how it goes. :slight_smile:

Great start of a thread and great work so far! I’m curious to see your texturing and the resulting PBR renders.

How many Triangles for your finished product?

Nice work btw.

I made something similar but with far less detail recently.

Nice work!

Cool work so far. I am optimistic about the final on this one.

Thanks @Zed, Candy, const, BluePrint and Kemmler!

@Candy I’ll try and fix the legs… the front of the calves does look a bit sharp, but that may just be the shading. Samus is a little strange when it comes to artistic interpretations. There’s so many different stages as far as the suit goes, and then she looks slightly different in each game. I’m doing my own spin though. I wanted her to look realistic, might make her a redhead/strawberry blonde since that’s what she looked like in the first game. To give some perspective as far as lore and timeline goes, I’m placing this after all the events of the entire series, following Metroid Fusion when she loses her regular suit. This is a redesign, so it should surpass all the previous concepts and be the most superior iteration of the suit so far (one that she hand crafted herself using remnants of the old suit).

@const I’ve been trying to figure out how far I want to go with detail since I’d like to do a series of cycles renders and that demands a certain level of quality and realness, but the game model may not need so much high level work. Like, right now I’m trying to get skin pores figured out… (and don’t worry about the hardsurface stuff, I’ve got a lot of experience with that :P)

for example I’ve got most of the face done, added in some placeholder hair/eyebrows:
http://i.imgur.com/jNDfoX8.jpg

(and that might look like a little too strong of pore detail, but that may just be the levels adjustment I did in photoshop, either way I can tone it back easily enough since pores are on their own layer)

@Zed, yeah I was kinda going for that. Wanted to shy away from the fantastical proportions of the games, made her fit but not so skinny she wouldn’t be able to lug around a 100 pound suit, yet still wildly attractive, given the fact she was genetically modified to be the ultimate fighter and savior of the universe etc etc. :stuck_out_tongue:

@BluePrint Current polycount 20+ million, I hope to get that down to about 75-100K for the game character, since that’s about the current standard for main characters in AAA games.

So here’s the plan as far as it’s materialized in my mind.

  1. Get character art/model done
  2. Do some studio renders, close ups and some interior architectural shots
  3. Compile them into a magazine interview (think like TIME magazine or something similar) with lots of questions/answers relating to the lore of the game and some that expand my personal concept of Samus’s personality. It’ll be a nice exercise since I’ve finally figured out how to use Adobe Illustrator and I like writing.
  4. Publish the article and start working on the game-ready version
  5. Rig, do a few animations, put it in UE4, Unity, Marmoset… just see how it works.
  6. …maybe actually make a game prototype side scroller or FPS or combination of the two? (hey, I mean, it’s been done, it’s possible)

Anyway, I’ve got some school work, so I probably won’t be back until this weekend. (also I feel like I need to finish Metroid Prime 3 first…)

And before I forget… HOLY CRAP IS THIS PROGRAM USEFUL:
http://www.pureref.com/

It’s so handy for keeping all my reference in one place, organized etc. I used to use Picaso’s collage feature but Pureref is just so beast (and you can get it for free since it’s name your price). My only complaint is that is uses a lot of memory once you get over a 100 images, which I do a lot. Fortunately I run 16 gb, so 1gb of memory usage isn’t that bad.

dang

my rig has

1,298 triangles :smiley:

I guess the BGE teaches you to be a miser…


Super metroid is one of my favorite games of all time…

my game “Wrectified” is a mix of Metroid, Megaman legends, and minecraft…

Good luck and Excellent modeling!

@Blue Super Metroid is the shiz, played that game soooo many times, good luck with your game project!

I’ve got the polypainting for the diffuse/albedo map almost finished, which I’ll then transfer into spec/dermal maps and bake out hi-res details.

Before baking I need to do a retopo of the sculpt, for sake of time I’m just going straight for the game tier geometry then I’ll subdivide that for the cycles geometry (so in other words, this has to be really clean geo since it needs to be riggable both ways).

I’ve got the head finished for the most part (subdivided on the right):

http://i.imgur.com/bnDbddj.jpg

I’ll try and get back once I get the retopo done. Any crits so far? (there aren’t any ngons, the wire treatment made certain flat edges disappear) Thanks!

Spent the better half of the afternoon retopoing the hand… you know they’re actually harder to retopo than make from scratch, since normally you can just duplicate fingers, but I had to realign and reproject the details which was a real pain. Happy with how it turned out though…

http://i.imgur.com/vK386in.jpg

So I’m all done with the retopology process (thank God). It’s one of the most tedious parts of 3D work, though I do prefer the end result since it’s so much easier to manage. I’ve tried to make it as animation-friendly as possible with extra loops around joints and wrinkle areas. I should be done with UVs and maps by the end of the weekend, hopefully.

I only have ONE triangle on the entire mesh, which really ticks me off, but I couldn’t get rid of it without doing some insane remodeling. Fortunately it’s in a flat, non-deformable area, so that’s good.

Polycount (in tris):
Sudiv 0 (modeling/farther LoD): 18,038
Subdiv 1 (up close game): 72,220
Subdiv 2 (render quality): 288,880

View (NSFW)

After I’ve gotten the body model finished (with hair, eyes, eyelashes etc) I’ll move on to clothing and the undersuit, then finally I’ll build the power suit on top of all that.

Anybody know of a tutorial that shows how to do photo-realistic eyebrows/eyelashes with blender’s hair editor? I’ve tried doing it before but usually it just ends up looking weird, particularly the eyebrows, so I normally just bake the eyebrows into the texture and normal maps, which isn’t the best practice.

Hey, there’s a new WIP Render (NSFW) (2000 samples, 2k resolution)

I really want to get this looking correct, and I want to use SSS if possible. So I tried rendering with GPU experimental, but CUDA was just like:

http://i.imgur.com/I8kq0uJ.gif

because apparently six lossless 4k textures are too much for 1gb of vram. So I’m stuck with CPU, just like with most of my other projects. Any suggestions as far as shaders go? Right now I’m just using Arnold’s and tweaking the weights until it looks reasonable (though the back scatter is a bit heavy handed at the moment).

(this is what all those textures look like btw):

http://i.imgur.com/v4Q4lFi.jpg

Next up is clothing, eyes, makeup and hair which I’m not too happy about having to make, since blender’s system is so freakin finicky, both in terms of shaders and just grooming. Any suggestions for awesome, realism-level hair shaders? Thanks!

I saw someone using a trick to reduce the number of texture maps. For your black and white maps (specular, bump, masks etc), you can place them on separate channels inside a single image; e.g. the red channel could be one map, the blue another and green another. Then you can separate the channels in your material nodes. It looks like you only have two black and white maps, but maybe it could help you to get back on GPU; or at least help on a future project!