Hello!

I've been spending quite a while tweaking and adding detailing to the Highpoly mesh. It's been a lot of fun getting into the microdetailing along the shoulders and armour. 

Also I ended up creating quite a few custom VDM brushes for this to save time on the smaller details like the seams and stitching between pieces. 

All the renders for the Highpoly were done in keyshot using a simple 3 Point setup and a plastic material with procedural occlusion/curvature colour. They were pretty heavy rendering time wise (A good 4 hours a render) but I normally leave it running at low core useage in the background while doing other things. I think its worth the time just to not have super noisy renders :D

The nonhelmet version has some additional hair strands down the sides of the head that would be pushed against the head with the helmet on. 

I'm going to regret making these high density feathers, retop will be a nightmare!

Extra renders of the gloves, these used a ton of VDM to turn the basemesh surface into something more interesting.

Hello!

Final set of body blockouts are done now so I can finally start going back into Zbrush and detailing the outfit pieces.

The main chunk of work for this part was getting making the rough icon shape from the concept into something more concrete. I ended up going down the same route as the weapon iconography but with a different pose. 

I created the pose using the elfs zbrush model and a basic rig. Then imported it back into zbrush and transfered the pose to a detailed mesh. The horns and spikes were parts of my store asset packs and the wings/hair are a load of repeating meshes moved around with latices in maya.

Horns/scales from these:

https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/ezlg/zbrush-snakeskin-21-vdm-brushes 

https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/aRzx/zbrush-horns-vol-1-vdm-imm-brushes 

The weapons still need the large bits blocked out but thats relatively simple since the icon work is already mostly there.

Additional Icon renders in other materials for fun.

Hello!

A lot of this post was thickening and polishing forms of armour pieces and more importantly adding hair. 

With the hair I'm going to experiement on wheither i do it with alpha hair thats a bit more realisitic or chunkier clumps. The meshes that are currently in are a series of strands that I made, uv mapped and them fit into place around the head. Ideally these meshes are the final hair pieces to help save a ton of time retopping and currently sit at 24k tris (a lot can be deleted where it is hidden later on).

The helmet had to be repositioned a little forwards to actually fit the thick curls in behind it but it doenst really chance the silhouette too much. 

Also aside from thickening the armour pieces and adding trims I decided to use the feathers to recreate the spikes on the armour from the concept. I think it makes the design more consistent having consistent iconography itterated across the model.

With the hairstyle I have an additional set of strands that are visible when the helmet is off. The space between the side of the helmet and the head was very small making the strands get squished into the head or worse, clip though the helmet. 

Hello!

Based out a lot of the main clothing/armour over the weekend and got the face to a more refined point. 

In the end I changed a few things in the base mesh proportions to fit the concept more accurately as when i started adding clothing some parts were looking a bit squished. Main thing is the neck and leg length increasing, as well as minor torso tweaking.

The pants are the most finished bit at the moment and have several zbrush layers to controll the folds and edging. I've found it super useful to go way over the top with the strength of detail using layers and then bring it back down to a level that I like. Stops the indecision of how far to sculpt since its nondestructive.

Also made a few VDM brushes for fabric edging to make unique and consistent edging for patterns. Which again I used on layers to control the strength

Should be one more pass of base meshes and thickening of the pieces and then onto getting the hair in place. 

Some extra closer shots.

Hello! decided to do a series of blog wips of next character I want to create. I plan on making a series of fantasy characters in the end so hopefully if all goes well I'll post wips for all of them. Critique is welcome, there's always something I can improve about my work.

First character I wanted to do was a battlemage of some sort and ended up deciding on doing a dark elf/drow one as they are one of my favorite fantasy races. 

Before building the concepts I created a new body base mesh in zbrush with over 80 layers of sliders so I can change the proportion and race of the base mesh without having to create new ones. After playing around with the proportion sliders I got some orthographic renders of the rough elf proportions I think I wanted.

Now onto the concepts. I started off just concepting something of a mid power level and complexity (Concept 2) and then pushed the complexity up with concept 1 and 3. I haven't really bothered with polishing these images as I want to focus more on the 3D.

I got super carried away on creating 1 and making her look like a high level character but it's my favorite design out of the 3. The semitransparently cloth bits might be quite difficult to pull off and the build time for the outfit is much higher than the other concepts. 

This was the first concept. I like the simple forms and more fuctional armour pieces but is a bit boring compared to the others.

Second concept ended up looking more like a druid than a battlemage, so this one is the least useful for this character. Still like the design though, maybe the metal gauntlets and leg plates should be removed to give her a more agile feel.

Pretty much decided on creating concept 1 because of the challenge a lot of the pieces will give and also it's the most flashy looking design.