Borderlands Siren
polycounter lvl 11
With borderlands 2 around the corner and being a big fan of the game and its art I thought I would take a crack at making a character that fits its style. I drew up my own siren that has a fire based ability she can use to super heat her knife so that it can cut through most anything. When she can't cut through something she will blast it away with explosive or incendiary rounds. So far I am pretty pleased with the face, hair, and body. Kept things simple and stylized only putting in details that will be seen and not covered by cloths. Will start making all the cloths and armor tomorrow. Let me know what you all think. 
UPDATE:
Dumping some new renders. Got her rigged up and now working on the final renders. Have a couple versions, would like to know which people like more, the gold glasses and red nail or the green glasses and nails. I also have full body renders of her without her tattoos glowing so you can see her in regular relaxed mode.
UPDATE:
Dumping some new renders. Got her rigged up and now working on the final renders. Have a couple versions, would like to know which people like more, the gold glasses and red nail or the green glasses and nails. I also have full body renders of her without her tattoos glowing so you can see her in regular relaxed mode.
Replies
That and how you add the costuming without necessarily doing the ExtractMesh?
In some cases, I will actually use zBrush to extract certain elements especially when working with hard surfaces such as metal. Combining extractions from masks with the clipping brushes can usually give results faster than generating the primitives in Maya. It also allows you to stick with the creative process of zBrush instead of going to the more technical side of things. Hope this helps as there are a wide variety of workflows that achieve similar results.
@Turret I'm loving the direction the sculpt has taken especially the hair. The hairline seems too straight. I gave an example below of a type of hairline you could use. You could also give it more of a gentle curve. Something to get away from the feeling of it falling almost straight down.
For now here are the pants and belt area. The new insert multimesh brushes in Zbrush 4R4 are really fun to play with.
Besides that, the only other feedback I have is on the backpack type buckles and straps that are located on the leg bags and knife case. I really dig the style on the belt buckle and straps on the boots. They look somewhat futuristic... It's the one part that seems to break away from the overall style.
Kon: I agree that the new strap around the handle would make drawing the knife slower, but after looking at more reference it just ended up being more practical to add it in. As for the futuristic belt chain I wanted to throw something like that in since borderlands is a weird blend of tech and thrown together scraps. The textures should pull it all together.
I put in the final damage on the shirt, moved parts of the face around and got allll the subtools into one Ztool. Looking at the whole thing together I might have to enlarge the head a tiny bit to better fit the style but I think I will just do that on the low poly after everything is baked.
So here are the wires. I used 3D Coat for the first time and it was fun. There is a couple wonky things but I will probably be using it from now on. The knife will be retopoed separately. Time for some uvs and baking.
OtrickP : My workflow isn't really anything special. Base mesh made in maya, zbrush the hell out of it, retopo in 3D coat, and UV in Maya. I bake out normal, Occlusion and bent normal maps using Xnormal and with those maps get a couple more out of Crazybump. Put them all together and I get this detailed black/white texture to start with. Learned a lot from BoBo during the darksiders weapon contest and Daphz has a nice breakdown of his texturing process here http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=97270&page=2
Magmabolt: The textures should add a lot to everything but I will keep an eye out and make sure its balanced.
Mithdia: I admit I have had a lot of issues with proportions with this model for some reason. After I finished the Zbrush sculpt and right before retopo I went back and shortened up the legs a bunch. So they should be accurate but I will take another look. The angle of the camera and the way her pants sit around her waist make things look a little wonky though.
Flumpinator: I really wish I had some solid method for that hair but it was just a lot of masking strands of hair off, clay to build up the shape and then using trim dynamic and H Polish to sharpen it down and pinch to bring it all together.
Liking the palette and the variations from the hazard stripes and blue piping. This is looking very stylish and in tune with the ingame assets, really nice.
Seriously inspirational work here, nothing else to say but well done.
Can I ask how you made the net-like mesh on the trousers? Is this a insertmesh or was it created? I was after a similar effect a few months back for a rucksack...
Other than that good job all round. You should be happy with it.
great job!