Officer Nadine

This character was a step back into the production of start to finish hero asset development which I haven't gotten to do in a hot minute! The intention was to create a high quality hero character from start to finish (including concept design and planning) with reasonable polycount and texture set usage.

I've seen a lot of (unfortunately) great looking images of AI characters in the last year and my goal was to make a character of similar styling and quality without amorphous blobby artifacts marking it as machine generated. The general idea was an attractive looking girl of high status, with military and religious theming in the character design. I wanted the palette to feel warm but regal. The first sword I made for her was very ornamental and not practical at all but very fancy! This lead me on to create a secondary more reasonable combat sword to complete her design. I really enjoyed the layering of different elements, even if they presented their own challenges:

-Asymmetric and somewhat organically shaped armor pieces with engraving.
-Layers of drapery and cloth
-Layers of leather padding, straps and hardware

This character was broken down into several texture sets:
Main Body: 4K
Armor Pieces: 4K
Head: 2K
Hair: 2K
Cloak: 2K
Eye: 1K
Weapon A + Scabbard: 4K
Weapon B + Scabbard: 4K
Transitional Eye Details: 512px

Polycounts (triangles):
Combined: 143,606 Triangles

Hair (including eyebrows, eyelashes): 41.8K
Combat Sword with Scabbard: 10K
Ceremony Sword with Scabbard: 16.7K
Cloak: 10K
Armor: 19.2K
Body (including eyes, cornea, mouth, head): 45.7K

Average Texel Density between 20-30 px/cm depending on visibility.

Hair cards made in XGEN and placed by hand

An important focus of mine for this character was to keep distinct layer of armor on top of the main body. In a more strict pipeline the model might have to be compressed together to allow for total contiguous retopology. I appreciated building out large macro elements like the cloak and armor separately and being able to toggle these layers during presentation and in various lighting conditions.

I hope you enjoy this work!