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Character<br />
Step by step: Model<br />
a cute fantasy figure<br />
Tesalia 2010<br />
A young female centaur visiting the ruins of her<br />
birthplace Arkadhia, an ancient mystical city<br />
Carlos Ortega Elizalde specialises in modelling and texturing<br />
Modelling<br />
T<br />
esalia was created from scratch in Maya and<br />
rendered in mental ray. I created her as one of<br />
the two main characters for an animated story<br />
which I’m still developing. I went for keep-all elements in<br />
a stylised fashion, keeping c<strong>art</strong>oony proportions without<br />
being too childish. One thing I took a lot of care with was<br />
the modelling. As this is a female character, the<br />
silhouette had to be thin and delicate, but balanced and<br />
solid at the same time. The armour, weapon proportions,<br />
facial expressions and colour palette had to reflect the<br />
attitude of the character: cute, pure and delicate, yet<br />
dangerous, agile and strong. The final rigging was one<br />
of the most difficult tasks, as it was tricky to manage<br />
extreme positions in face and body and avoid a harsh<br />
look at the same time. At the end of the project, the rig<br />
could have used a bit more cleaning, but that stage was<br />
enough for the still images purpose.<br />
Concepts<br />
Inspiration behind the scene<br />
I created the original model about six<br />
01 years ago in Carrara 2, as one of my first 3D<br />
works since centaurs are one of my favourite fantasy<br />
characters. Back then, my skills were pretty low,<br />
so this year I decided to model the character again<br />
with more style and detail.<br />
I changed some things from my original<br />
02 concept like thinner proportions and a<br />
different hairstyle. I did a quick sketch in Photoshop to<br />
block the main proportions of the body and the zones<br />
the armour would cover, as well as the basic colour<br />
palette, which consists of a dark magenta and white.<br />
Most of the inspiration I had for the armour<br />
03 ornaments were the beautiful floral graphics<br />
created in the Arts and Crafts movement and, in a<br />
special way, one of the pages of The Centaur, which has<br />
beautiful decoration. This helped me to enforce the<br />
pure and elegant nature I wanted for my character.<br />
3DArtist ● 117
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