I picked Indonesia as my country, and more specifically Bali what has a very different culture (strong Hindu influence). My character will be the Monkey King, a character from the epic Ramayana Legend.
Jan 26, '21
Apr 5, '21
Here are some of my main references.
Those are real statues from a Balinese Temple.
I will use the statue as inspiration for my character.
I started sculpting the face. It has been challenging because I want to make an "humanoid" monkey man, so mostly keeping the human anatomy but with monkey features. I don't want my character to look like I attached a monkey head to a human body. I have been smoothing some of the strong features of the monkey and mixing it with the human anatomy. Here are the results so far...
Monkey Head Reference
My Head sculpt
In this update I fixed a little bit the proportions, specially the distance between eyes because although monkeys have smaller eyes and they look closer to the nose, I'm trying to mix between human and monkey features. My main monkey reference is the Macaque, typical monkey in Bali, not the chimpanzee which has more similar features to humans.
Then I started to add more details to the face and body such as wrinkles and skin details. Those details are helping to sell better the concept, I think once I start to add hair that will help even more...
Hand Details
For the hands, I decided to look at gorilla hands as reference. Macaques have very small hands and don't fit so much with the style I'm looking for.
Following the idea of blending human and monkey features I enlarged hands and feet but keeping the human anatomy.
Then I started the re-topology. High poly had 5,510,762 faces (triangles), low poly has 5,690 faces (quads).
And I unwrap my model for the UV, this is just the body. I plan to split my model in 4 materials, body and mouth/teeth/tongue, eyes, hair and finally clothing and accessories. I made the face much bigger because I want to make some close up renders of his face, and I want to have a higher resolution. By the other hand I laid up all my islands following the same direction to avoid issues later when texturing.
