3d art

Character
Refining details
Finishing touches and the environment
The last step for this character was to model the
09 armour and bow. I started with all the armour plates,
most of which consisted of extracted geometry from the
body, then tweaked and refined them to fit the way I needed.
I modelled several pieces of ornamentation to use later as
accessories for the armour.
The basic bow shape was created from a cylinder,
10 extracting the top face and tweaking the verts as I
progressed. The bow’s decoration was added later as separate
geometry, using some of the pieces I’d previously created. The
rest of the accessories consist of earrings, an arm bracelet and
a diadem for the head.
Colours and
materials
I painted all textures by
hand. I didn’t want to
create realistic skin or
hair (just personal taste),
so I only painted different
skin tones and very
subtle moles in the skin
map, while for the hair, I
painted colour variations
as well as an Alpha map
for the tips of the hair. I
used the misss_fast_skin
shader for the skin, an
Anisotropic shader for
the hair and a Blinn
shader for the armour. I
kept my palette to a few
colours – the dark
magenta with gold hints
to suggest royalty, but
included some wear in
the armour to prove this
girl knows how to handle
herself in battle.
I created a rig for the face
11 and body to get several
expressions and poses, from which
I picked a couple to render inside an
environment as still images. The
environment which I decided to
create was the ruins of the main city
where the whole story plays out,
adding a more ‘solid’ context for the
viewer from a still image.
Taking inspiration from some Ancient Greek ruins,
12 I modelled a series of arches and columns, in which I
sculpted some damage using Subdivision surfaces. I duplicated
the arches section to get a decent set of architecture that could
resemble the ruins of a once powerful ancient city.
The final touches
13 regarding the modelling
of the whole scene was the
addition of plants and flowers.
The ground is a simple plane
deformed with Maya’s Sculpt
tool. The grass, plants and
flowers were created using
Paint Effects and then
converted to polygons.
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