Hidatsa Character - Sculpt 1

For this project I've decided to make my own concept because I couldn't find one that was fitting. I started by gathering a lot of reference about hidatsa people, their clothing, accessories and also took some inspiration from the Wild West challenge on Artstation. In the end I decided to make an old warrior lady who uses a long bow as her weapon of choice and in her design I incorporated features which I've seen on many native american people, like the dress with a piece of cloth tied on the waist for women, tasellated paints, soft leather boots, twin braids hairstyle, multiplte necklaces and bracelets with traditional motifs, but I still took my creative freedom with it and didn't make it completely historically accurate. Trying to balance the details and keep simple but still interesting in terms of accessories, which are quite complex in real life, I decided to just have a beaded necklace and bracelet, circular earrings, a long necklace with a big pendant, a leather bracelet with metal decorations, a metal upper arm bracelet and an leather armguard (for using the bow). In the case of the pants, rather than having them tassellated on the whole length, I preferred to just have a few tassel to get the idea across, the other pieces of clothing I would like to keep simple and detail them with the textures by adding patterns.
I didn't actually spent a lot of time creating a polished concept as it wasn't necessary, I just made a quick sketch for myself to see the main features that I want and then quickly blocked it in in Zbrush, and then made an overpaint of the model to decide on the final elements.

I started with a quick block in of the body, I didn't want to have it too detailed at first, just something to get the proportions right and make the clothes on top. One of my main goals with this project was to learn Marvelous Designer, which I used to create the top, waist cloth, skirt and pants. I watched a few introduction tutorials on it to get a sense for the interface and basic tools, and I didn't find that difficult to work with and create the pieces of clothing the way that I wanted. After importing the clothes to Zbrush I spent a bit more time on them to clean up the topology and fix some of the folds.

Next thing that I blocked in were the belt, bracelets and shoes. For the hair, I made the main hair cap from a sphere and the braids using Zspheres by creating the zig zag shape for one of the three hair strands of a braid and then duplicated it 2 times for the other strands, putting them in the right position and at the end, inflated them to close up the holes.

Marvelous Imports^

The next things that I wanted to get in were the accessories. Most of them I sculpted directly in Zbrush starting from primitive shapes. Made a feather hair ornament, circular earrings and a buffalo head pendant. For the beaded necklace and bracelet, I created 4 types of beads and made an insert mesh brush from them and used it in curve mode to create a string of beads where I wanted to place them. Also, I blocked in in 3dsMax a quiver to quickly place on the model and figure out the right position. For the pants, I decided to have a few tassels on the side and have stitches going from top to bottom.

At this point, I had all the main parts of the character in place, so the next step is to go back and detail everything over the next couple of days. 

This is the work that I managed to get done in the first 3 days of the project.