Ana's Game Art Blog: Hidatsa Character

Spent the last half of the first week detailing the sculpt. I found doing an old person quite challenging and more time consuming. For my face sculpt, I used a lot of references of old native american women and tried replicating their features. I used references of old women from different tribes for the rest of the body as well and tried to make the details consistent and really give the impression that the character is aged. Still because of time constraints and wanting to finish the sculpt in one week, I had to be selective with the details that I would have on the body, so I spent the most time working on the face and hands.
When sculpting them, I started very broad to get the main shapes and proportions in place, and then worked my through secondary forms like the main wrinkles and skin folds. At first, I kept everything symmetrical so I could get the details done more quickly, but afterwards went back and changed the shapes on half of the face. Also, I added a scar on one side of her face to help with the asymmetry and because I figured that as a warrior, it wouldn't be uncommon for her to have scars. I am thinking of adding some more scars on the rest of her body if I finish in time. For the small skin details, I added noise to quickly have some pores covering the skin and then added more particular pores with alpha maps, on multiple layers so I could quickly tweak them if necessary.

For her overall build, I wanted to make it slim but still fairly toned and used references of old people who are very sporty and active, and noticed that their muscles were still quite toned and only the skin lost its elasticity and was hanging in certain areas. I wanted to keep the hands at the same level as the face so I spent some more time working on them to add wrinkles and skin folds. Looking at old women's hand pictures I noticed that the skin looks thinner, almost translucent in a way, and the veins are showing a lot, so I tried doing that on my sculpt as well. Also, changed the position of the fingers a bit because I felt like they were too bend before.

For the rest of the model, I had the same approach as until now, so I went back to each of parts, subdivided them and added more details on layers. Still, I didn't want to bother with adding stitches, cuts and things like that at this point, because I would that in the textures. Also, changed the pendant of the necklace completely because I was not happy with how it was turning out, instead I found a reference of a bird shaped necklace with a stone on it and changed it to that. I added some antlers at the end of the braids to give them more weight and thought it would be a nice detail, still keeping in the theme of the character. For the hair, I wanted to make a base sculpt in Zbrush and then add more details to it with hair cards, because I thought that having braids completely made out of hair cards would be very budget expensive and time consuming.

The only things that I would still want to add to the model would be more feathers to decorate the quiver and maybe some tassels at the edge of the cloth wrapped around her waist but I am not completely sure about it. I would also want to make some arrows and a long bow, but I am planning to make all of them directly in 3ds Max.