[Mixamo Contest] Necromancer, Kali (NSFW)

jim · Jul 2012

Been lurking awhile, wanted to enter this contest.

I want to make Kali, the goddess of death.

Some reference is slightly NSFW.

I started with a female mesh (I modeled the basemesh myself):

jim · Jul 2012

I added arms and hair.

I wanted the hair to have a windblown look:

jim · Jul 2012

With the arms attached and side shots of the hair:

brwnbread · Jul 2012

this looks promising, I'm interested to see how you do the anatomy

lotet · Jul 2012

looking cool, I like it, hope u manage to fit this into the polylimit with all them arms =P

jim · Jul 2012

Thanks guys, yeah it's hovering around 15,100 + tris right now, I gonna to optimize more.

Kali is typically shown with a trishula (trident), sword, crown, tongue sticking out, holding a severed head, with a necklace of skulls, and skirt of arms.

Here she is with some of those:

Dduoas · Aug 2012

Great work of art, cool you. You are really ingenious.

Evanescfan · Aug 2012

Love the direction you're taking with the hair

JR · Aug 2012

Cool idea. It´s developing pretty well. Keep it up!

jim · Aug 2012

Thanks for the kind words, guys.

Been a while, so I'll break this up into a few posts.

I realized I needed to pose the face so that I could get a better sculpt. I decided to give her a bit more character around the mouth as she screamed-and I thought the Natalie Portman rap face was a good fit.

I like how much her upper lip curls.

Also, the hair base mesh reminded me of ram horns, so I added a little bit of texture at the beginning of the hairline to kind of reference that.

jim · Aug 2012

If you look at the reference pics earlier in the thread, Kali is typically shown with a skirt of arms. I thought it would make the silhouette look bulky, unwieldy, plus it would have blown out my poly budget, so I made her skirt like flayed arm skin sewn together.

jim · Aug 2012

Here are the weapons: the sword and the trishula(trident).

jim · Aug 2012

I started to sculpt the chest:

It started out as something like the skirt. Kali is usually depicted as wearing a necklace of skulls, and I wanted to integrate them into her chest. But then I realized that it was getting too busy.

Also, I found reference of dancers dressed as Kali that I found really striking.

The simplicity and nakedness of their chests made a forceful image, and I think that's appropriate for Kali. So I'm going to opt for something in between- I'm still going to integrate the skulls into her chest, but let more of the skin show.