Quote: "While the models are great looking, I am worried about animation. You don't have enough polys in the arms or legs to allow for smooth bending, once rigged. You may want to add a few edge loops in places like the elbows, knees, shoulders, and upper thighs. "
I'd echo those thoughts about the animation, yet after the response you get doubt they'd be taken to heart.
Quote: "probably I already did more animations that you will do in your entire life...just in 2007 I produced 4 long animation films, more than 300 min animation ...don´t worry about it."
I really would suggest not throwing around the amount of work you have put in to your recent projects as to why you are right and others are wrong believing that it is more than anyone here has ever done.
For example, I have been doing Artwork (2D and 3D) as well as a 3D Animation for almost 15years now. Half of that in a professional capacity either via games, television, film, or graphical design (architecture and presentation)
The links that were provided were of work that honestly while proficient doesn't really qualify you to be dictacting that you know better than anyone else. I have worked with a few people who could really claim such, but they're always open to suggestions and critics even if they never impliment them or know them to be silly.
While your ZBrush work looks good, there are quite a number of issues with the sharp edges; with far too much blending between aspects that should have very clear lines to seperate them.
The proportions also are quite iffy in places providing more of a cartoon aspect to them, as opposed to mimicing the realistic style you have used to shade them.
Although on the point of the shading DO NOT USE PHONG. Phong Bad.
This tends to highlight problem areas far more, and will lead to a very fake overall appearance when the ZBrush image is then baked on as a normal map. Details should be far more subtle as to provide a more believable nature to the normal maps.
As far as the game models go, aside from the edge-loop issues that will cause the limbs to more fold than bend without more skinning than really is necessary (causing more work for you in the long run to prevent these rookie mistakes) there is a huge difference in detail. Particularly on the Devil model.
Only provide detail where detail is needed, not where you feel you can benefit and aid the normal map. This will not work, and mean extra polygons which could've been used better in other parts.
More to the point a model that is normal mapped really should be using a clean and roughly equally divided up mesh. This prevent potencial stretching issues caused when mapping the texture later and cause horrible pixelation within a shader.
More to the point this will also help it to animate much more cleanly as well, not to mention allow the lighting model of the vertex lighting to compliment that of the normal map rather than trying to fight against it.
The game model should be far smoother over-all (not more polygons, just smoother) that way the normal map will have a much stronger appearance.
I'd also strongly suggest that unlike the id software team who thought you could just throw a zbrush normal map straight on to your model, you actually go in to photoshop and manually clean it up. Provide the additional detail the Zbrush can't. This will also allow you to chop up the image in to multiple sections based on where it is on the model so multiple shader effects can be used in order to bring it to life better.
I know too many people who believe cutting up textures from a single 1024x1024 into 4x 256x256 or such for each different material the model has is stupid and uses up more data in memory, but when dealing with shaders it'll create a new instance of that 1024x1024 for each material pass. So you have far more wasted space and more wasted video memory... also don't be afraid to produce a low-resolution version of the textures (diffuse, specular, normal, etc.) as people should now be getting in to the habit of loading the low-res with the model, then loading the high-res on-demand.
Helps with loading times no-end, as you can simply swap out textures as loaded. Then again I guess realistically that's more a tip for those who'll use these models.
I mean on the whole they look good, but you've fallen in to many of the pit-falls that TGCs current artist (Jon Fletcher) has with his FPSC X10 media. In-fact the only model he's made recently that particularly impressed me was his female assasin.
Quote: "please , someone could say if there is a good directx viewer , that displays polys with normal and diffuse together?"
DirectX Viewer (from the DxSDK) someone should have it.
