Maewenn
polycounter
Also called "Battle-Mage Phoenix", she is both a Sorceress and a Warrior.
This new character was primarily imagined as a new skin for Mevenn, but ended up being a completely new character. I've used Akeytsu and Mevenn rig as a blocking base for concepts alongside PS for conceptarts, ZBrush for sculpt using mostly a SubD process so really intensively the ZModeler (it was a nice discovery btw ! I think more about ZBrush like a complete modeling tool now).
The rig was also a real pleasure to explore (thanks to Akeytsu), and has also forced me to experiment more on clothing & face controls. I may create more anims with this character in the upcoming months (it's just so coooool to manipulate in Akeytsu ♥)
You can read more infos about the character here : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/YawoGK
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Hello there !
This post won't be about Star Wars Redemption (sorry !), but about the new project I've been working on last weeks. If you've followed my twitch streams you may already know this new character, named "Maewenn". I want to go back on the very first steps of her creation, it's mostly about concept art and Akeytsu
So as stated above, "Maewenn" was meant to be just a skin variant of Mevenn from Star Wars Redemption that could be used anywhere I need to promote Akeytsu, but the more time I spent on drawing/doodling pieces of this new skin, the more it turned to be a new character. And it was the opportunity to rework drastically the face, since I've always had issues with Mevenn, even after all these years of improvements I still needed to "fix" it once I was animating her face, same goes for her body. While Akeytsu offered me a quick way to test new proportions using the existing Mevenn, ZBrush was the final step to separate Maewenn from her big sister, the idea was to have a more dynamic character, taller, thinner, with more "matching" shapes and from a different universe, more about sorcerers, knights, potions, well : magic stuff !
Here are a few doodles I made from time to time to capture ideas of designs for the new skin :
TIPS : Draw with pencil+paper any idea you may have, and at anytime (I always keep a sketchbook and a criterium with me
)
So once a few of these ideas has been laid out, take your favorite app (akeytsu
) and open a cool rig, close to your design if possible (so here it was obviously Mevenn), and simply reshape the character rig up to your proportions needs, if the rig/skin are pretty well done it's fairly simple and fun to do, but the best part is that you can choose posings that are perfect in terms of perspective, and they will also give good clues and an overall idea of shape and anatomy on which you can base your character later on 
Here are the two main poses I made with Mevenn, for the wand object I simply used a few boxes as a landmark :
Then I simply drew my armor designs over these various screenshots in Photoshop, at this step the idea was more to block out materials and shapes than anything, it's not meant to be definitive.
The first one is not my favorite one at all, since it was a warm-up one, but there's still a few shapes that starts to comes together pretty well, I especially liked the left leather glove balanced with heavy metal claws, I think it adds both elegance and strength to this sorceress hand.
At the conceptart step : Iterate a lot and try to find matching shapes, here you don't see every steps of every parts, but I test a lot of lines to get something that have a cool flow to start with at the modeling step. I know this won't be final final final, but this helps finding the good shape in the end. At this step, feel free to imagine whatever you want. Place yourself into the character role and figure out what she would like to have in your hands, what to wear and how it feels to be under a hood or into a heavy armor
I've based my final design mostly on the 3rd concept but I've looked a lot to the second one, as well as my quick doodles from time to time when I was sculpting. At some point I made a few more sketches to define local parts a bit better. As you can see the initial name was "BattleMage Phoenix", this was about a heroic-fantasy version of a Jedi. The double blade was a difficult part to figure out once in sculpt part, as a lightsaber it's easy to retract and carry on your belt, but with solid blades it's obviously harder. That's why I finally ended up leaving this weapon really behind, which consolidated my will to create a character appart from Mevenn.
Then I choosed ZBrush to create the Highpoly character model (as well as some lowpoly parts), and I really liked the possibility to manage my poly the same way I do on 3dsmax while having no lag and the ability to turn any desired meshes into sculpt-able parts. Here's a WIP screenshot just before sculpting body parts
After that, I used 3dsMax mostly to cleanup my lowpoly mesh and do UVs, then Toolbag for bakes of my base maps (Normalmap, AO, Cavity)
and finally 3DCoat to handpaint the whole stuff. It's important to keep in mind that at anytime a quick draw could save you hours of processing, so at texturing time I wanted to help myself with a quick colorsheme test on the previous concept
Here it is : (based on the concept I made earlier with a few adaptations based on the final model of course
)
And here is the final result in Marmoset Toolbag 3 :
Front/back views with all stuff laid out :That's all for the making-of
Here are some renders of the highpoly meshes (made in ToolBag, the VXGI helps to get a quite soft and interesting surface result (and it takes no time to render it ^^ I hate waiting)
Highpoly sculpts :
HighPoly Sculpt of Maewenn - Weapons, since I want to be able to animate many different situations for her, I've made several weapons. I may add a shield one day
And if you're wondering...yeah, these potions are definitely inspired by those from Diablo 1
Original skin. I called it "Phoenix", since it's the first visual that comes out from her sister ; Mevenn from Star Wars-Redemption (some shapes are really close, and they share a very similar rig in Akeytsu
This skin has some inspirations from "Vyr" stuff from Diablo 3 (I liked the White/Purple/Violet mix they did, here I tried to bring something as cool on Maewenn
This one was very inspired by a game that's deep in my heart : Sacred (by Ascaron). I wanted to make a fan art of the VampireLady tons of times, it's still not one but...well, it's so freakin' cool !
And this skin was just...a french touch ^^" Got some family from "La Bretagne"
That's all folks !
Des Bisous ♥ !
I've recently did a lot of polish on this character so now Maewenn has mbetter textures and you can mess with her two cute companions
Here comes the update :
As usual, everything is rigged, skinned & animated using Akeytsu, no need to tell how precious this software is for such tasks ♥ Textures are made 100% with 3DCoat, same as for AKeytsu = Best software in its category in my opinion, and Marmoset Toolbag 3.03 for rendering (since this version perfectly handles both non-compensated & compensated scale mode)
And I'm super happy since I've managed to create my first own font using FontSelf ♥ Which is a must-have tool for UI/font artists I guess
That's all !
Des Bisous ! ♥