feather accessory quick and easy

To easily create the feather I searched in the tutorials within digital tutors and came across this guide done by Justin.

It was a straight forward tutorial to get the results I need for this accessory. By creating the one feather I duplicated it multiple times and aligned them in to place ready for exporting into topogun.

using the shadow box technique will help me create other feather type designs in the future I hope to someday try out this full tutorial to make a similar creature.

adding colour in zbrush

Continuing the tutorial on digital tutors to colour my model I tried a variation of a green and yellow combination as I think they come across as a peaceful colour, green because it was associated with nature and yellow for happiness sand blue because its associates with good.

Creating the skin colour was a great success using the spray colour to create the pore like texture on the model. I did the same process with the arms and face.

With alterations and experimentations with the armour pieces I had decided to go with this overall colour scheme.

With the model fully coloured it was time to move onto the next stage which was to prepare for exporting into Topogun. 

Triskelion symbol

When it came to detailing the plates I wanted to find a meaningful imprint to put on them and came across the Triskelion symbol. Upon researching this symbol there was so many meanings such as moving forward or progression, but there is another meaning that really suited my design.

The Triskelion symbol also means three worlds. The other world, the mortal world and the celestial world this is another meaning for the Triskelion symbol. For a shaman type character I found this very important as a shaman would be into his spiritual nature to communicate with all these worlds.

Here is the symbol implemented into the front plates, again learning with z brush I couldn't quite implement a smooth polish for the edges of the symbol and hope to smooth them out at a later stage of creating my high and low poly models.

shoe creation

To finish off my character the last thing I had to create was the shoes. Again I started in Maya blocking out a form of what I wanted the shoe to look like, before taking it into z brush to alter the shape and smooth out the model.

I still wanted to keep the hard edges in this design so I only smoothed out the inner areas and kept the outside edges hard to appear more rigid and also appear to have a more mechanical feel to them.

With the shoe finished I was able to easily duplicating and mirror the shoe design thus finishing my overall character. So for the next stage I was ready to start painting my character.

futuristic jewllery

To create the necklace I looked up futuristic designs to help influence how I would want the jewellery piece to possibly look like while sticking to the concept. I noticed that to really give a futuristic feel involves something glowing and it looks cool.

The process I used was a pipeline with Maya and Z brush by starting of blocking out a basic shape in Maya and creating detail in z brush.

Because this was going to be a small piece in the model I did not focus too much on it as it would not be appear large scale as some of the larger piece. 

progress so far on zbrush

With the continuation on z brush I tried implementing some fur textures to see how it would affect my model. I quite liked the look of the fur but it was not the way I wanted the fur to be, as it was to tidy were I was after a kind of wild scruffy and free look similar to my design.

To add a more futuristic feel I implanted some small shoulder mounts that would give of a wee glow. These were made in Maya and imported into z brush.

All I have left in the design is to implement the shoes and maybe some accessories and to finish of my concept while continuing watching the tutorial on digital tutors by Matthew Keane

Front view

Side view

zbrush and digital tutors

http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/1361-High-Resolution-Game-Character-Creation-Pipeline-in-ZBrush-and-Maya

Working in z brush I will be following this tutorial provided by Matthew Keane in digital tutors.  Starting off with Maya’s exported version of the dress which were originally a trouser mesh. By following the tutorial on how to create folds and shape the fabric such as a trousers and shirts I used the knowledge I learnt there to apply onto my dress mesh and also started creating the shape for the two metal plates in front as part of the dress.

After I had made the dress and shaped the plates I moved onto making the belt part of my model the sides and the back of the belt were simple to shape and mould but I paid more attention in creating the front face as it would be a main visual because it was at the front of the model. Putting in the detail was difficult. The thin inner line was the tricky part it created rigid edges on the mesh which were difficult to fix, I tried smoothing out the mesh but that didn't seem to work so I thought I could fix it later when I had the model back in Maya.

From here I was able to join the dress mesh with my belt mesh together giving an almost complete lower body. A few adjustments were made to get the pieces to form but this was not a difficult task.

I also took the time to slightly improve on the chest are again just to give it a wee bit more detail.

To make the helmet more interesting I started to sculpt out the detail with the same method I did with the front of the belt again I found difficulty getting it smoothed even when I had turned on dyno mesh but it didn't help but again I will wait till I have exported the model back into Maya to fix it.

To create the jacket and the cape I went back to Maya to block out an easy form to start bringing the model together.

Progression so far