[RIOT CREATIVE CONTEST 2017] Character Art - Resistance Fighter Morgana
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Hi!I´m a long time lurker, but first time poster, and i´m very exited to enter the contest!
What i´m trying to make here is a skin of Morgana that can fit in the cyberpop and Project: presented worlds; So instead of her dwelving into dark magicks, she got help from old, but robust technology with a dash of some bleeding edge that she manages to steal.
Replies
Wings:
I personally feel that the wings are morgana's most attractive part of her design, so i began to work on them first. The idea behind them is that they should feel somewhat kludgey, but at the same time be aesthetically pleasing.
Clothing:
I wanted the clothing to be something simple, but that also allowed morgana to still have something that could resemble a dress of sorts and at the same time feel practical. This ended up being easier than expected, because there are very few pieces of clothing that are large and rugged enough to fit the bill, so a trenchcoat ended up being the perfect choice.
Shoes:
Finally, the shoes were another tricky part because Morgana doesn't have legs in most of her skins, and in the one she does have, they are basically silhouettes, so i had to extrapolate from her general designs. Originally i had the idea of making something like a high heeled combat boot, but it ended up looking way out of place with the rest of the elements, specially considering that everything else looked tough and strong, thats why in the ended up choosing a boot that looked like a combination between a combat boot and a safety boot.
Continuing from the last post, now that i had a silhouette that i liked, it was time to add the details and basically make look my model less...dead.
Thankfully, this was fixed quite easily by adding the eyelashes, eyebrows, closing her mouth and adding more detail to the hair so it didn't look like an amorphous blob. So basically everything.
Now she just looked crazy and so very not Morgana. Big improvement if you ask me.
Next point were the hands. As how i had originally envisioned them, they were just going to be normal hands, and for most of the time they were, but in every skin Morgana has either big hands, or they are huge nails, or she has some sort of gauntlet that makes her hands larger, and i just couldn't live with myself if i just made the hands bigger, so i designed something that could help with the idea i had in mind; The gauntlets/claws helped her focus power, but they were going to look very utilitarian and somewhat fragile.
At the end she ended up looking better and was ready for the retopology and UV process.
So that was what i started with, and after some time deliberating, i started on the face because i felt it was one of the parts that would give me problems. And boy, they did.
The face was basically my test bed for almost all the problems i encountered in the rest of the pieces, which they basically were:
-How to make something flat look with depth.
-How to use the lights and shadows to make the model look good from most angles.
-How to texture the different pieces so they feel like they are reacting to each other.
And this is how it ended up
Then came the pans and the coat. At first i thought they would give me more problems because of all the fold they(and this specific case) have, but the only real problem i had at the end was the masking process of the seams that the height maps left.
Then came the hands and the boots. To my surprise, the hands took very little work to do- the height map did most of the work, and the boots were mostly done, and only needed a little touch up.
Finally, the wings were the only thing left and they were challenging because i didn't exactly knew how to render them properly.
The initial plan was to create something that was basically going from robust and worn out technology to high tech and new, so the backpack/jetpack was going to be something like a block, like if it was from soviet russia or some similar era; meanwhile the engines would look somewhat sleeker and less worn than the backpack, but not as advanced as the wings. Meanwhile the wings would be the cream of the crop; they would look like if they were from a failed PROYECT skin, and because they were connected to outdated tech, the wings would be kind of defective and were prone to flicker/malfunctioning, hence the gap on the wings. But at the end i decided to ditch the idea of the malfunctioning wings, mainly because i couldn't animate them in time and it was doubtful that i could achieve the desired result.
And this is the Final product!
Definitely there are a lot of places i can improve on, but im really happy with the end result, but mainly that i could deliver it.