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

[mewtheed]

So is this it? am I good? is everything in order? this is stressful.

[mewtheed]

Alright, after a good night/day of sleep my adrenaline levels seem to have stabilized. I'll take the opportunity to talk a bit about what happened this last week and give more insight on the character them-self.

So like I said a few post above, I wanted to use the extended week to further polish the model and make it more presentable. And by polishing I don't mean tweaking some stuff left and right but remaking whole portions of the model from scratch. Because I'm a mad man and I hate myself. So among the redone stuff the most notable are the skirt/guard the head, the hands, the arms and the plating on the torso.

then there's the whole story about the ring. Basically, it's gone. I really didn't like the way it looked in 3D. It just ended up looking busy, messy and heavy. I guess I could have made it work given enough time but, in the end I decided it just was not worth the effort.

So I went back looking at some old drawings and concepts I doodled on sheets of paper while browsing through references. and rethought about the idea of a floating ribbon behind the back in the style of these Buddhist deities, which I like because I want to include more Asian inspirations into the design. Back then I didn't use that idea because I didn't want to use objects made of fabrics (for story reasons I only wanted materials that can withstand the test of time like metals and ceramics) Then one day suddenly I was struck with the idea of make a ribbon out of a nebula. It just fitted well with the character's concept of being the byproduct of a star and solved many problem I had at once. It's striking and eye-catching, it adds colors to the model and give a nice twist to the design, it has light, ethereal even somewhat magical properties, and it doesn't weight down the character. And with it I was more comfortable with making a more subtle and elegant background.

I really wanted to do it, but there's was a problem, I didn't know how... Modeling? sculpting? procedural? then I remembered "hey, Blender has a built-in Smoke simulation feature, let's see how it goes" and after maybe 30 minutes of scrubbing through tutorials on Youtube and a few trials and errors later, I got a smoke sim going on. I loved the results but there was a problem. turns out smoke sims can be very time consuming especially in addition to the rendering. I ran almost out of time. but thankfully I made it just barely, I just wish I had the time to make a few more renders for the detail sheet but oh well...

So that's the story of how I didn't give signs of life for more than a week and got to post my stuff just a few hours before the deadline.

edit : have a screenshot

[fantasymaster]

This is a very inspiring idea. Good job!

[archsider]

Looks so good

[mewtheed]

My entry just reached over 1000 views! that's incredible! I don't think I ever garnered this much attention with my work since... hum...well, granted, I don't share my work online very often, if at all... but right now I'm trying to bury my anxiety and try to open up a bit, I'm gonna have to anyway if I want to get a job somewhere in this century preferably... So to celebrate this I made a few bonus renders of Mintaka and decided to tell more about his/her/their story for those who are interested (as I totally forgot to do so earlier). So here it is.

(Since Mintaka is technically neither a "He" or a "She", I'll use the pronoun "They" to define them. Sorry for any confusions and prepare for a grammatical massacre)

"Mintaka is a being born from the heart of a star. A mineral life-form made of unknown residual matter that refuse to melt down despite the extreme conditions. When they grow big enough, members of this specie leave their native star to find a new one to fuse with.
As Mintaka was drifting gently toward our sun, a terrible mistake caused them to crash onto the Earth instead, causing their body to shatter upon impact.
There, Mintaka was discovered by the humans. When Mintaka tried to plead with these strange creatures if they could fix their shattered body and send it back among the stars, the humans believed hearing the voices of angels or goddesses and started to worship the pile of crystal shards. People from all over the continent came with various offerings of their own making. Golden wings, sky charts, a new body, charms and various contraptions supposed to help their deity go back home. But nothing worked, their technology was far too primitive.
It seemed the humans were doomed to fail all of their attempts. But despite that, Mintaka cherished their time with the humans which awoke an unending curiosity for their knowledge and cultures. But as the years and centuries pass, Mintaka was getting weaker and weaker due to the lack of radiations to feed on. Their body began to decompose in a thin stream of stardust. To keep their energy Mintaka decided to fall in a deep slumber until humanity matures enough to finally be able send them back to the stars. Nobody knows where they're hidden, how long will they sleep or even if they'll wake up one day."

So there you go, that's the story. Aside from that Mintaka has the ability to bend and alter all forms of light waves that pass through their body. which includes effects such as becoming opaque or invisible, turn infrared light into gamma rays, focusing light into a laser-thin ray and some more. The Nebula around them is actually a sign that they're dying. They dream to be one with the sun, they're around 11 feet high, weight about 3000 lbs, they love aurora borealis and hate the ozone layer.

And now have some bonus renders I did ^^ (I think I messed up the smoke resolution in some of them...oh well.)

there you go, hopefully you'll like it ^^

EDIT : WHAT THE I'M IN THE FIRST ROUND OH MY GOD I DON'T HOW???

[jerrison]

Amazing stuff, very inspiring.