Designs for school

[BigE]

I'm new here, I'm going to school in September for Digital Animation and I thought I'd start early with some designs. First off is a model sheet of one of my characters. I played around with the proportions this way I figure it would be more fun to model and animate. Any comments, suggestions, critiques would be of great help. I figure I'll throw some posing and expressions down the right side once I get a chance.

Thanks!

http://ericdo.250free.com/ModelSheet01.jpg

By the way, I'm fairly new at this coloring stuff...I never learned to paint(actually never learned anything beyond highschool about color theory either) and I'm starting to get "comfortable" with photoshop. I got painter-but I have no clue how to use it. So any tips on the coloring would be nice too.

[zeroe]

this is quite cool
he reminds me alot of the small soldiers figures.
anyways i think his outfit is a bit plain. Maybe some camoflage on the pants would be cool and perhaps some emblems or logos on the shirt. Apart from that i think it lacks some texture, in patzicular on the gun, boots and gloves. Just play around with it, cause it is a very nice design :D

[Johannes]

Sadly, I cant see the image - Im met with an angry message and bright colors saying:
"Due to an inordinate amount of abuse, visitors to this free account from your region or country have been restricted."

Evil... :D

[BigE]

zeroe-Funny you should mention small soldiers, a friend of mine was just suggesting that I check that out for reference. I was and I'm still considering the camouflage-it would be interesteing but the reasons why I didn't add any camouflage initially is because:
a) I was going for a SWAT guy type of thing and they don't really wear camouflage.
b) I'm worried that the camouflage might be too "busy", I'll definately give it a try though.

As for the upper body-you're right it is a little plain, maybe I could add some pockets and a name tag?

As for textures...I have no clue whatsoever how to do textures...I wish I did man. Hopefully they'll teach me that in school or I should go out and buy a book or something(I'm still learning how to use Photoshop).

Oh, and about the logos/emblems, I plan on putting one on the shoulder-just not sure what kind of a design I want for that yet.

Johannes-Try this link then:
http://www.deviantart.com/view/2767726/

[Johannes]

aaahh, check it out. Its good and funny - thumbs up! :D

Looks like a cross between he-man figures, and hmmm, action force. Hmm, werent there even a movie with small soldiers coming alive? Tommy lee jones (!) was the voice of one of them, if I remember corrrectly. :)

I agree with zeroe that it needs some more datails in the clothing. Maybe sticking, folds also it can have shoulder straps, little pen-pockets, double-sewn layers, maybe elbowpads? The decisions are endless.

Doing textures is not so hard, mostly hard work, but getting the darn thing on the right place eeds something called UW-mapping (the whole little soldier kind of "folded-out" so U paint the whole thing on the same piece of texturegraphic). Sadly I dont even know a good book on the subject.
But hey, someone else maybe does! :D

[Milho]

Hey BigE,
That's really a cool design. The coloring also became nice.
There are some minor anatomical issues IMO. Nothing big and hard to see at first glance.
First on the first front perspective. The ellbow of his right arm seems to be to low which makes the triceps pretty long. On his left arm the biceps is covering the deltoideus in a strange way. Just at the axilla.
On the colored piece his right hand looks a bit odd.

I think that's all I found. Correct me if I'm wrong. Hope it helps.

The design it self is great! the shirt is a bit tight compared to the trousers. The other stuff was mentioned I guess.


:chug:

[BigE]

Johannes-The movie you're referring to is "Small Soldiers". Also, the more I think about it-I don't think I really want to add too much more detail to the costume (probably just a shoulder patch). I don't want it to get too busy. I would rather rely on solid animation and creating a strong silhouette. I think proper lighting will give it the detail I want-if I'm wrong I can just create a new texture map.
I think what you were referring to is UV mapping. Creating a flattened out texture which you then map onto a 3D model-however, I think what zeroe was referring to was digitally painting different types of textures on my illustration-something of which I have no clue how to do yet.

Milho-Thanks for the advice-I'm usually pretty keen on picking up those anatomical errors-but I've been drawing this guy for so long I couldn't see it. I've since corrected the mistakes-just haven't composited the corrections yet.
You're right about the inconsistencies concerning the trousers too-never realized it until you mentioned it.

Here's the other character I'm working on. She'll probably be at least half the height of the first character to really contrast the two of them. I'm worried about whether or not they belong in the same universe or not. There's a few minor details I need to work out-but this is pretty much what the character looks like.
Rather than post a cleaned up version like with the first model sheet I thought I'd post up my sketches and clean it up after some feedback. Clean-up is a pain in the @ss and I'd rather go through it just once.

http://ericdo.250free.com/ModelSheetGirl.jpg




The feedback I've gotten so far has been very helpful-so thanks to all!

For those who can't see the image posted, click here:
Character Sketch (http://www.deviantart.com/view/2832737/)