Ritchie WIP

Hello Andrew! How are you doing?

Thanks for your comments last time Andrew, sorry it been so long, since then the weeks have just flown by. I’ve been hard at work doing a mixture of concept design and testing to prevent running into problems later on down the line. Instead of just drawing my concepts I also decided to use XSI and zbrush to sculpt a design. Doing it this way has allowed me to knock the mess around so I can look at different forms. It has also allowed me to look at texturing elements, lighting, and I even played around with putting hair in-between the snakes. At first I considered doing medusa with a masculine physique and big hands, but since then I have opted to keep the body more feminine. I’m pleased with the head design but I think the body needs to be curvier and some of the proportions need sorting as well as the texture. I’m in the process of re-modelling the character so that the typology is better according to muscle flow. I’m modelling the character as a normal female so that it will give me the option of morphing with targets and displacement!

For this project I was thinking of morphing the character from a beautiful medusa to an ugly one or doing something with her mouth similar to the reaper in blade! Just wondered what you think to either of these ideas?

I’m in two minds at the moment in terms of what an employer would like to see!

I’m a little unsure when it come to attaching the snakes to the head! Would I be best making local subdivisions and leaving holes for the snakes to connect too? And I’m unsure about the snakes and their uvs when it comes to duplicating them and merging?

Other technical issues include:

I’m gonna use displacement and bump maps for the detail. Would I be best splitting the uvs of the character onto separate maps because I sometimes have trouble with the detail coming through on the displacement maps or is their a better solution?

I’ve put some of the things up for you to have a look at. The pastel medusa is what I did prior to the start of this project. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks again!