GR#082 - Rat Warrior

[Winston]

one thing that sort of bugs me is you can't hold a gun completly verticle, if you took that gun and made it slightly angled it would look really great

[0xDB]

Into which direction would you suggest to rotate it? Turning it either way seems to hurt the composition imo, as counterclockwise, it would come too close to the perceived orientation of the tank-killer, whereas clockwise it would come to align too much to the minigun.

I'll try nonetheless, but suggestions are welcome. I think it will be hard to tilt it just very little and at the same time not making it look jaggy.

[CaKsTeR]

I'd say rotate it left a bit. Not as much as the rocket launcher, though.

[0xDB]

Ok, I did tilt it to the left now by manually cutting out pieces and moving them around and then aa-ing the jaggyness. However, that approach does not seem to work, as the result looks crooked and blurry:



I'm currently leaning towards just keeping the gun at the original straight up angle, despite it being possible unrealistic, maybe I'll try redrawing the gun completely though but then I would also change her right arm, so that she'd hold the gun in that classic (often seen in movies) way where it would rest upon her shoulder and go behind her head.

[Jakman4242]

The belt definitely needs work. Everything else looks very good though.

Oh, and with animation the gun. Try separating the gun from the rat, rotating the entire gun, AA it, then place it back into the rat's hand.

[Turbo]

Great, great stuff. But here goes some critique on stuff that popped:

The volumes on the torso, given the lightsource, aren't very consistent. The shadow on the ground indicates the sun is at an angle, but the shading on the torso seems to indicate a lightsource directly from the top. It'd be more interesting to follow that angled lightsource.
Also, i'd remove the waist tapering, and reduce the chest and shoulders width, to show a more rat-like anatomy and less human like, i don't think it's working very well as it is (what with that pouched belly going on, right under a very thin waist).

Other than that,s that's some bad ass rat yo, fo sho'.

Now with rough edit. Added some reflected lighting from the sand.

[0xDB]

update, addressing what Turbo said and showed:


The reflection of the sand on the bottom of the rat did not seem to be right when I applied it, so I removed it again. I don't think that a rough surface like fur does reflect as mirrorlike and shiny like that.
I did shift the main fur color some more towards yellow though.

Also while reworking the lighting on the body parts, I found that one of the tails shades was a nice additional color to make the fur even more soft.

[offtopic rant]
Today was the last day of my vacation and tomorrow I'll be back at work, coding boring business software all day, so I don't know if I'll have much time and energy left in the evenings to continue working on this, meaning there probably won't be any updates till next weekend.

Thanks everyone for your critiques and edits so far. Later...
[/rant]

[Helm]

But the most important part of turbo's edit for me was that you shouldn't render every strand of hair on the rat individually, that you should go a bit more abstract.

[Conzeit]

umm, the clarity and the amount of care in this piece so far gives it value.

However...as the reference shows the face isnt quite rodent enough yet, the neck isnt supposed to be so distinguishable and it's snout should stick out further.

More imprtantly (IMO) the rat seems kind of...blank? I think it lacks a clear expression on it's face. Are you trying to make it look ridiculous? or are you seriously trying to make the rat threatening?

I think you should make up your mind about that and change the rat's expression and the atmosphere of the background accordingly

Say, if you want the rat to look badass make it's expression clearly threatening and the dessert background misty and far more detailed.

You want to make it ridiculous; then give it one of those scared expressions rodents usually have (check the ref there), and maybe put him in a sandbox inside a park or something.

[Destiny]

The rats head looks sort of like you wanted a view that makes the head look like its slightly tilted backwards, but the body looks out of view in comparison. Still looks nice though.