Nihteana High Poly Armour

Last week I finished the high poly model of Nihteana, the first thing I did was to complete the shoulder pads. These skulls were also used to hang from her belt, but without the decorations.



I had a basic skull/shoulder pad that I made in 3ds Max, from that I dug out the shapes more and sharpened the details. Then I added the decorations by drawing the on by hand. I would have used a pattern to do this but I did not know a way of doing this on a surface that curves on several axes, or curves at all.



This was also a problem when creating the bracers, I had the shapes and edges complete in order to maintain the hard edges. To solve this I tried adding a sketch that I had made to test the placement of the pattern in 3ds Max through adding the texture as polypaint. There were some issues getting it right, but in the end I used spotlight to paint it on and get a general idea of the placement.



When I had it placed I used the pattern as a guide to carve the decorations into the bracers by hand. As I mentioned I could not find a way to draw the larger patterns onto the curved surface but the flowers were small enough to use the image as a brush. Since the bracer is not completely symmetrical I was also unable to use the mirror brush, meaning I had to carve the entire thing by hand.

Back to ZBrush

Since we finally got our release out I have been able to get back to working on Nihteana. There were a few things that needed fixing but most of the work was to create the missing pieces, such as armour and belt. I had not prioritised them earlier since I wanted to test the main body in animation before completing her. In case there were any problems it would be easier to adjust before adding details. Once I got to that point however, I had to switch tasks and work on environment assets and the release that was made in early January.

My greatest issue with the model was the elbow, I had problems trying to figure out exactly were the muscles should go and how the skinny dead arms would look. I figured out that I had thought right but executed it wrong, meaning that I needed to move the muscles on the lower arm to match the "elbow bone" better and create more of a crease. This meant that I had to go back to ZBrush to adjust the Highpoly model.

This is how it looked before, the elbow bone is at the back side on the bottom of the arm, while the fold is on the front side of the arm.


When fixing it I moved the fold to the upper part of the arm, so that it would be in a straight line from the bone of the elbow.


I had also decided to enlarge her hands, to achieve a more stylised and creepy look, again this meant making adjustments in the Highpoly. The hands were also a bit flat so I rounded the hand, lowering the sides with the pinky and thumb and raising it around the middle finger. Even though I thought I had adjusted where the fingers start on the hand (they do not start from a straight line) it was also looking too straight so I pushed it towards the hand between the pinky and ring finger and away from it between the ring and middle fingers to make the silhouette more interesting.


Because of making these adjustments I destroyed some of the details, meaning that I had to re-enforce the knuckles and sinews. As I had to to this I tried to emphasise them even more than I ad before.


 

I was planning on showing the armour pieces and belt that I have been working on, but this turned out pretty long so I will save that for the next post. :)