Always imagine your character design is in motion as you design it. Imagine they are an actor at a costume fitting, talk to them about how the movement is, imagine them trying stuff.
You absolutely must imagine things in motion but also in context- imagine them moving through a room doing what they are supposed to do.
Form always follows function, and so the function is your priority.
What is needed from this thing?
Can you get inside? Does it become damaged? How should it make you feel? How many are on screen? What distance do you usually look at it from?
This is often why you DONT want to finish the high poly first.
Make a rough model and import it, see if it does what you need it to first. Then you can spend ages working on the high poly, knowing the work isn't wasted.
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Detail acts a catch point for eyes, or can be general noise- texture. Placing details strategically to catch and lead the eye around. Think of it like a pinball game.
Okay, so I haven't done a #gamedev tip in a while, and I have a little relaxation time for the next hour or so and feel like doing something. Do you have any questions? DMs open if you are embarrassed to ask.
Lemme just give some quickies whilst I am waiting.
1. For 3d artists, set a toggle key to toggle on subdivision. This allows you to see if a mesh has accidental overlapping topo, holes or other errors. In Maya hit the 3 key. In Modo, the tab. In max assign the NURMS toggle
2. Every material assignment, vertex color hard edge, uv seam or smoothing group hard edge actually splits the mesh under the hood- upping your effective vertex count.
This is why UV count is better than "polycount" to measure a meshes overhead.
Let's take an item such as Merman's corn cob sword for an example.
To use it in Mortal Kombat, it would need to have anchor points in the right places and orientation to attach it to the character's costume back, have the right hit boxes and have those call back to the character
Now let's move that over to Among Us. So, same sword, now utterly incorrect format. Not pixels, not cutesy style- and at the scale shown, the corn cobs would have to be simplified to show up, meaning it looks totally different too.