FMP - Week 18 - Part 2

Non destructive workflow and minor setbacks 

I began texturing yesterday, and working in programs staring at the screen all day can sometimes skew your perception of your work, however when working on the character's face I couldn't shake the feeling that he looked more than a little bit like an alien. 

Convinced that maybe I was being too hard on myself and before I went back and changed any mesh geometry, I took a break and decided to come back to the model with fresh eyes.

However, this morning I looked at it once again and noticed a few things. First of all, here is a screenshot of the face: 

See what I mean now? However all isn't lost just yet, I had a few tricks up my sleeve that I was still willing to try before I went to change the geometry. Firstly, I was trying to go for glowing green eyes similar to those in World of Warcraft (shown below), however I don't think that it is going to work with the enlarged eyes inspired by Zelda games. So I attempted to make the eyes look more like eyes from the Zelda games and it helped a little but still not enough. 

(Reference for the eyes of Blood Elves in World of Warcraft, the same that Kael'Thas has)

Below is my attempt at fixing the green eyes to look more like a Zelda character, but it still wasn't looking right at this point. 

Finally I made the executive decision that his face geometry simply needed to change. His jaw was too slim, and his eyes were lifted up too much at the sides, only further accentuated by how big I'd made his eyelashes. So with all of these things in mind, I went back to my high poly, then my low poly, and fixed everything one step at a time.

This is a good time to take a moment to remind my future self that the non-destructive workflow that our tutors teach us definitely feels like an annoying waste of time, but it's like insurance, you never need it or think its useful until you most definitely do. 

The fact that all of my meshes both high poly and low poly were still able to be edited easily without causing any major issues meant that the editing of his face geometry wasn't actually as daunting as I thought it was going to be, and here is what it looks like now: 

As you might be able to tell, I edited the eyes to make them work more with the Zelda style and I scrapped his face textures because they were making his cheeks look too gaunt, and overall I'm much happier with how it looks. I probably won't keep the amount of darkness that is around his eyes currently but thats okay, we'll revisit it.