Helena the Fire Keeper quick brief
well... i've been asked to make a decent tutorial about how my model came to be, so here it is
idea
i can go on and on about the story i have created for Helena to live in, but i don't feel like mentioning it here. The most important part is that the idea came mostly from knight's amour and fire. (before you ask, yes, the concept art was the 30 minutes run)
base mesh
i simply exported the base from DAZStudio Genesis then make some adjustments to make her look better (by "some" i mean.... a lot) after finding making the base from Zsphere might not be the best idea (espeacially when you have a 1 month deadline, yup, time is crucial here)
armor block out
since her armor is most consist of relatively flat parts, i simply used mask then extract with 0 thickness for the blocking out. Fast and effective.
Armor detail
i used the shell modifier in 3ds max to create thickness for the armor. Then for the smaller details, again, mask and extract. A few more touch up and the armour is ready.
Posing
The pose was not the idea i initially planed. Well that just came out of nowhere, but it looked cool, so i kept it.
Nearly there....
Some quick render i've made in zbrush
Hair
the hair you're looking at is the combination of zbrush fibermesh and 3ds max hair farm. I'll spare the details. Overall, you can practically make any style out of them.
UVs
i'm not going to complain how much pain i had to go through. In short, i used the zbrush UV master with a lot of remeshing and merging.
Texturing
Finally, the boring parts are over. I used substance painter for the texturing, obviously. You know, just drag and drop. Just a few more touch up here and there, you're done.
Rendering
First time trying to use Marmoset toolbag. Not very hard to get into (just another drag and drop). However, i'm not quiet happy with the light set up and materials displayed here. I mean, there isn't a lot of customizations you can make with it. Still, after a whole week of "try-hard-intensify", i got the result i'm..... ok with.
Conclusion
From this project i've learnt a lot to be sure. Mostly, how to shoot the project for a close deadline and how to properly present my projects in the future.
It was fun. I'm looking forward to participating in another cubebrush contest soon.
