The Beast of the Northern Mountains
And so I’ve decided to the join the contest. This will be my first 3d contest, so here's hoping to finish it at all.
Outlined here are the steps I’ve taken so far. These fist few images are sketches done not to illustrate my idea but rather finding it. Sketching out possible direction I can take in realising the design, from an alien diplomat/leader looking character, to dragon/lizard like creature to a ‘Tikbalang’ (Philippine mythological character who has a head of a horse and a body of a person), anything goes for me at this early stage.
Then I decided to sketch forms in 3D and see what I can come-up with. at these Point I stared to lean more toward a female looking charcter. It is here to that I’ve started listing self imposed restriction in order to get a clear idea of what charcter Im going for. You can see from these images the elemnt(s) and influence(s) in the idea Im going for.
Here’s is where I experimented on a charcter idea where in ‘She’s” born out a scientific project gone wrong in the attempt to alleviate water polution, but I saw someone already doing a chracter somewhere along that line. So my experiment on that didn’t last very long.
In between these, when Im away form the computer I would doodle on my phone some ideas too, and it led me to a horned beast character for a concept.
And I tried to experiment a bit more on that.
Here is when I think I got close to solidifiying my idea. This last sketch, also a phone doodle, displays charcteristics that Im aiming for, a chracter that is simple but relatable. There’s some personality in her face that I really like.
I think this is the direction I'm going for my design, it’s probably a good time to gather some image reference to help solidify my concept.
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Picking up from previous post, I started to block out the character. I use combination of zsphere and and subdivided cubes to block out body parts much like when blocking out basic shapes when drawing.
After initial block-in, I did a quick zremesh and pose the character. I do this to get a better "feel" for the character. This also helps me visualise the character's personality better; proud and confident, commanding, grumpy etc.
Posing was done in Blender using bones.
Using the pose too I did a quick paintover in PS for the general concept
Unfortunately, I lost that Blender file and can't go back to rest pose (T-pose) and have the quick sculpt intact, so I have to go back to my previous zbrush file and had to sculpt the forms again from scratch.
Continuing with sculpting. Here I've merged major parts of the body into one mesh. It also took me a long time sculpting because I self art direct a bit too much. Initially I got carried away with sculpting and had muscles a bit too pronounced for my taste or at least for this character. Im basically aiming for a strong, lean physique but also still feminine.
Eventually I had to stop constant iteration on the sculpt and move on.
So I've started modeling clothes and accessories. These are done in Blender as Im more confident modeling there than zmodeler.
Im gonna export these accessories back to zbrush for quick sculpting and hopefully start retopology soon after.
Sculpted some details on the clothes and accessories.
wireframe shots:
27K Tris
with accessories:
47K Tris
Wireframe with Normal maps:
Low poly with normal, ao and curvature maps
Keep it up!
forgot to include this in the previous post.