Kim Reaper [Life With Death]

Second project - character art. The goal was to aim for something semi-realistic, to ramp up the difficulty gradually.

This is Kim Reaper, the lead character of the web comic Life With Death by Danielle Gransaull. I stumbled upon a piece of fan art by Mr. Optic Nerve on Deviant Art, and thought she would be an interesting subject and challenge. Check out his gallery here, his Planescape:Torment artwork is especially awesome!

Everything was done in ZBrush. I figured that it would be wise to concentrate on gaining proficiency at one software package at a time. As an added bonus, I wouldn't need to worry about exporting models to Maya. Post was done in Photoshop, of course.

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Here's my concept art:

And image planes:

You'd probably notice that her final pose is slightly different from the concept. I made several bad decisions in my workflow that drove me into a corner. The meshes had a high poly count even at their lowest subdivision level, resulting in Transpose Master (a rigging/posing tool in ZBrush) being unbearably slow. I just couldn't pull off a more complex pose. Lesson learnt: keep low subdiv levels for all meshes, at all times (If you'd like to read up on what exactly went wrong, I've written a long-winded post-mortem you can find at the bottom of the post).

The textures look pretty dull. I didn't want to add much grunge, and I didn't want to add logos and the like to the clothes. I wanted to stay as close as I could to the original character as possible. When the project was nearing completion however, I got really antsy about her clothing looking too bland, so I deviated from the concept (naughty!) and added straps and buckles to the boots. Threw in a zip for the jacket, too. The buckles are pretty effective, I must say. Pockets on the jacket, more interesting trims, a simple belt and the like would have gone a long way. Thou shalt accessorize! 

On that note - clothes! Loads of fun to do, but pretty damn hard to sculpt realistically. The folds don't seem quite right, especially on the looser/hanging parts of the jacket. You'd also notice that in the concept art, the material of the sleeves are only bunched at the elbow. That was sculpted into the model, and it took input from my pal for me to notice it. I moved the mesh around, but it still looks off. I'm going to need a whole lot of practice for this, too.

Finally - the hair. It took me AGES to work out. I had a rough time translating the concept to the sculpt (just like in the previous project!) which resulted in several scrapped attempts before I had to settle. That said, I'm pretty happy with how it all turned out. Her head has a slight up-tilt to it, so the volumes are a little obscured. As a bonus for sticking around, here's some pictures I screen-capped from ZBrush.

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Skip this part if you don't want to read a chilling tale of the villainous high poly counts.

I'd used zspheres to create the base mesh for the character. When working on the mid-level sculpt, I noticed that the facial features were slightly misaligned, and sculpted details weren't coming out perfectly symmetrical. The horror. The humanity! I eventually determined the problem - my mesh was messed up from the very beginning. There was a slight rotation in the zsphere that represented the head, and it screwed everything up. Long story short - I had to mirror the geometry, which created triangles, which prevented me from reconstructing lower subdivision levels. Double check your topology, folks!

Some parts of the clothing and props were poly heavy, too. I wanted to try out Shadow Box in ZBrush, and I went a little crazy with the resolution settings. I reasoned that by setting things high, I'd have more accuracy and thus less work polishing things up later. Transpose Master didn't like that.