Week 9: Aztec Finale

With 2 fairly solid male characters and a workflow I was confident with, I decided it would be worth making a female character, thus completing my 3 character goal. I spent the weekend and a little bit of the previous week sculpting a female anatomy base, spent a while going back and forth over some peer feedback online. Once it was at a point I was happy with I began posing the character. I looked at various reference within existing artworks of artists I had been influenced by during this project like Pascal Blanche. I did this to get an idea of how the pose suits the character design. Exploring how pose defines the character, and choosing a pose I could work off of and use as a base for what the design and context of the character should follow. I wanted a kind of confident and badass looking pose as this character would essentially be the warrior, whereas the others had more of a ceremonial priest vibe. I still wanted this character to look somewhat ceremonial and elegant in terms of the costume.

I was meanwhile working on a posed version of my original male character in which he would essentially be looking down upon his disciples, commanding them or something along those lines.

With a fairly solid style build up from the previous characters I could essentially just jump straight in to this one and work from the design I had already established.

A few concept sketches were produced to get a quick idea of what I could add that would fit in with the design and context of this character. My main thoughts behind this was that the character would be some sort of gladiator, who would need so have limited armour for the sake of agility, but armour covering key areas, so I followed the design of how gladiators could often have the bulk of their armour on the sword arm, as the other would be holding a shield.

I worked on a couple of insert mesh brushes for this project and it really helped speed up the production. A few generic looking Aztec and Sci-Fi pieces were sculpted and then implemented into a brush which was used for the character, and I also created one with some stone blocks that were used for podiums for the characters and possibly surrounding environments if I decided to take it that far.

All in all the Posing and Zbrush concepting for this character took 2 days, I then moved on to the rendering and over-painting the character. The render itself was comprised of many different render passes with various lighting and material pre-sets. I probable ended up with around 30 or 40 different renders, however obviously not all of them were used in my final concept. The lighting was something I took a lot of care with on this render.

Some colour iteration was done to get an idea of what looked good, but it eventually got toned down a lot so that the focus could be more on the detail of the sculpt rather than crazy vibrant colours. I still tried to implement some saturation and vibrancy where I could though.

Above is the final concept for this project. The product of around 2 days of rendering in Zbrush and painting in Photoshop.