FINAL | ARTWAR 2 | 3D | Mintaka (Prismatic Angel) | mewtheed

YOU THOUGHT ME DEAD ? YOU AND ME BOTH.

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Name : Matthieu Dagmey
Email : mewtheed.gamyde@gmail.com / matthieu.dagmey@gmail.com
Website : https://www.artstation.com/mewtheed

original post:

Well talk about being fashionably late to the party. I found out about this little challenge just two weeks ago, but now that I'm actually sorta serious about it I decided to share my work here.

With only 3 weeks left I'm on a super tight deadline but I'll try my best to have a piece that look somewhat finished even if it means cutting corners here and there... so wish me good luck! or not I guess... sorry it was rude to believe I could force you to wish me anything I'll crawl back into a hole now, -er I mean if that's OK with you...

It's kind of the middle of the night right now (or does it count as what people call the "early morning"...?) so I won't go too much into detail right away, but basically the whole concept behind my character came while brainstorming around the word "light" for a bit (oh yeah I should have mentioned I chose team Light. I'm sorry I'm so bad at this) I thought "Ok I want a character that can kinda control light or at least alter it in some way, but it won't be animated so it can't really be an action, it has to be a state. What in the world can alter light by just being there... Oh I know! Glass! Diamonds! Crystals! Water! all materials that does all sorts of crazy things when light pass through it, it refract it, reflect it, bend it in all kind of ways! Yeah let's do that! I started doodling and a week later I ended up with a character design I was satisfied enough with to start it in 3D. I'll post my designs tomorrow, once my brain is functional again.

And now here I am... My current goal is to finish the modeling before the end of the week, that shall leave me a week for the texturing and the rendering and another free week in case everything goes to hell. So wish me good luck! or not I guess...wait, Did I say that already? gosh I need to sleep.

TL;DR :
Late to the party
My character's vitreous
I'm going to sleep.

Hello again! Now that I'm here I can start sharing some of my early work and designs (which mostly consist in a few hasty doodles )

so here's how it all started:

This is some first draft to visualize some of the rough ideas I had. Something simple with a big emphasis on silhouette and shapes to get started, the two big ones are basically the winners and were reused for the second step below :

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I call this one Prismatic Angel 1.0. At this point I knew what kind of character I wanted to do, some sort of angel/fairy-like being made out of crystalline materials. It's still very rough (and with many mistakes) because I never expected to get it right on the first try anyway. That said I love the pose, the expression and the overall feel of the character, but the biggest problem is it's still way too simplistic and a bit all over the place, it's a mismatch of shapes thrown around without any real cohesion behind it. I felt like I needed something more, crystals alones can only go so far... so I went back to brainstorming some other ideas around (by that I mean spending the afternoon browing pinterest) and decided I wanted something more "constructed" and "artificial".

after another try this came out :

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That's Prismatic Angel 2.0! It looks much more interesting already, in the sense that it takes now more than 30 seconds to get it all. The character is much more fleshed out overall and there's the beginning of sort of a story behind it now. But I still wasn't quite content with it as I felt something was lost in the making... The previous version had a sort of whimsical charm that I missed and this version turned out to feel a bit too cold and robotic (I blame the straight lines for this). Then there's also the problem of the lack of cohesion in the style and the details that persisted still. So I went back at it with the goal of marrying the "feel" of 1.0 and the style of 2.0 and this happened :

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This is actually version 4.0, but the differences between 3.0 and 4.0 are so slim I didn't feel the need to put it here (unless someone ask me I guess). Now I actually have a very good feeling about this version to the point I decided I was done and started working on the model (So you see it's totally not because I'm running out of time or anything). It's not perfect, it's still kinda blurry around the edges, but I figured I could iron out the smaller details during the modeling.

So that's it for the character concepts, I'll update on the ongoing modeling later, Sooo....
...
...yeah. Later.

TL;DR :
here are my sketches
too bland, too cold then just right.
look at the pictures

A wild base mesh appeared ! well it's already more than a base mesh now, I was just fooling around with various techniques to find out what would be the most effective way to get around. Now I shall attack each of its body part one by one until the whole thing is done!

As you probably noticed I'm using Blender for the modeling. I know this soft has kind of a bad rap, I hope it won't hurt my chances, but that's the one I'm the most confortable with. I also have Zbrush Core and would have loved using it for this project but I feared my lack of practice would make me lose more time rather than anything else. Beside I've never really tried to model inorganic,"non-fleshy" characters with it, which means I would have to learn on the go with tutorials and stuff on the side and while it would probably be a great way to learn I feel too pressured by the time for that right now. So whatever, let's keep the sculpting for another time and do this the old fashion way like... moving vertices around and stuff..

Anyway, With each body part well placed I decided to work on each piece one by one from head to, er... lack of toes.

Starting with the head since it's the most important part of the character (or any character for that matter) It's probably the most difficult piece of the model (although that ring on their back looks pretty intimidating too) getting the face and the expression right quick would already be a huge step forward.

here's how the face is going so far :

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Once the head is done the torso, arms and legs should be smooth sailing (except that giant ring, it scares me). I'm aiming to finish the high-poly before next week, that shall leave me one week for the retopo, texturing and rendering. plus an extra few days in case I'm running late on something (probably that ring... Why did I draw something so complicated...?).

well that's all for today, My brain feels like it's drowning in molasses right now so I'll take a quick break. See you tomorrow.

Also no Haiku; I'm way too tired right now; sorry about that.