Exil : Lena

August 08, 2011

Since a few days I’m working on the main character of my game EXIL. Her name is "Lena".
I have already done a long time ago a first version of the character, but it was not very good and not adapted to the background and the spirit of the project :

The clothes on this model looks unrealistic and not very old/medieval like the game is, it’s more a latex suit… so it was weird.
After this I have redone a lot of concepts, new search, trying to fit the character to her environment. Lena is in the dead’s kingdome, so she must looks like dead, but controlling a simple skeleton is not very charismatic.
That’s why I have done new search (meh, again) about symbols and tattoos, about the death and I have discovered the santa muerte and his famous tattoos (theses arts are done by the artist Sylvia Ji) :

Then I have done new concepts for Lena. I have made some quick drawings for testings shapes, hairs, jewelry and so on. The final concept is this one (but I still can change the hairs and the face tattoos later) :

From this concept I have done the modeling of the character (from left to right : high poly in Maya, retopology and UV in Maya/Roadkill, Diffuse textures and finally rendering in Marmoset Toolbag for testing the specular) :

The body was "okay", but the head… Holy crap ! So, rather than doing a classic modeling in Maya, I have tried to sculpt the head based on a simple head mesh which was very neutral :

The hair are still WIP, I’m not glad of it. It’s hard to do, my previous tests with the first version of the head were not very good (crappy is the good word). All this work take a long month (at minimum) but I’m glad of the result. I still need to do the clothes by the way.

And to finish this blog post, an other video. I have made this little video quickly today for replacing the defualt loading screen video of the UDK. Simple but more in the spirit of the project :