[WIP Character] - Fencer

serpentine19

* Latest Update *

The beginnings of a new project. My goals this time round are to learn how to do realistic hair properly and work on some finer details/complex shapes within zbrush. My reference will be this awesome concept art by Ye-Lim Chae. I've already done a quick once over for materials and shape guides seen below and have begun the sculpt. First session felt a bit rough but the second I ended up pretty happy for where it is. Also been playing around with polygroups from polypaint for the first time and really impressed by it. Might cut down some of the pain stacking retopo later on down the track.

serpentine19

The body is "done", I say that with quotations as there are some small tweaks here and there that need to occur like the shoulders and while not shown here, the legs need to be made slightly skinnier.

Original idea was to do the hardsurface details in zBrush but maya was just 1000x easier and faster to create it in. This is just the first pass of the detailing made up of numerous shapes. Clean-up will come later so that it looks all smooth and nice.

serpentine19

This update had some reworks here and there but the major additions are the neck piece (this time done completely in ZBrush), the shoulder plate armor (still testing the thickness of the trimming), and the leg design which is fully blocked out but only the bottom piece shown here.

Still figuring my way around the leg piece, two methods I'm going to try are bend modifying it to the leg which will require some clean-up and is shown in the image, or taking the design that's flat, making an alpha and applying it as a mask to the leg. The second solution is sounding like the better one.

serpentine19

Progress report. Jumped into marvelous to try and get some nice looking pants. The result had a bit too much fold detail so I cleaned it up some and then pushed the knee folds further. The jacket hasn't been into marvelous so everything there has been manually sculpted.

A couple areas I've struggled with have been the shoulder armor overhang which I think I'm going to solve in maya and again with the shoulder armor, I'm struggling a fair bit with the cross design shown below. I've tried a couple of methods (box modelling, sculpting and using clip brushes) but it still remains a problem to overcome.

Ashervisalis

I think you should make her neck longer. It looks really short atm, like she's got her shoulders hunched.

serpentine19

Back after the Christmas break. Finally figured out the shoulder armor design piece and redid the shoulder armor with curve created trim rather than part of the same mesh. Created a basic chain insert mesh and placed them around as well as trying out mask patterns for the bottom torso design. The shoes went through a couple of iterations, having only the front to work from with the concept, some changes might still happen with them. Broke the cape into two pieces with my interpretation being the top part in black is a heavier fabric then the lower portion. Finally I recreated the head from scratch. Wanted to go for more eastern features based on Nadine Nicole from The Expanse (was watching it while working on this ) however not sure about the strong jawline as you can probably see I have already started tweaking the jaw, not really going for a likeness

@Ashervisalis Thanks for the CC, the new head is a bit different in scale/shape and I moved the capes collar back a fair bit (this will have to go back a tiny bit so the hair sits properly though after I did some quick hair testing). Hopefully it doesn't look like shes hunched now.

serpentine19

Last update before progress might begin to crawl after the holidays. Spent a lot of my time recently looking into how to do hair correctly along with a lot of trial an error. I think I've figured out placement but still playing around with XGen to get good looking textures. Mind the missing central strip of hair, was meant to do that today but spent most of it fiddling with XGen, guaranteed I'm going back to redo the hair again too.

As for the body, most everything has been retopo'd and a base texture applied. Wanted to really dig into the hair before focusing in on textures. You'll notice some scuffiness here and there.