Hello my dear readers, I’ll continue sharing my journey of this fanart sculpture.
Scythe
For Lady Death’s weapon I wanted to go further of the traditional wood scythe, I want to impregnate this asset with a supernatural mood, is not a common weapon or tool it’s an object created in hell, is almost a living weapon.
I went again with the bones and skeletal ornaments but this time with a more organic look. A direct inspiration for this design was the work of the amazing and talented H.R. Giger, the original designer of the “Alien” character from the movies.
His biomechanical style looks, in my opinion, terryfing, dark and full of the underworldish vibes I want to communicate.
For the blade and top of the scythe I wanted to have a section that looks like melted skin that joins the skull with the blade.
For the upper and lower sections of the main stick I used boney shapes and some details like vains or some organic engravings. I didn’t want to overpopulate this part of the weapon with little details, the goal is not to distract the viewers attention from the blade and skull.
Again, I couldn’t forget that this sculpture is going to be 3D printed and I’ll have to split it in two or three parts.
The handle has two boney protuberances (green ellipses) over and under the strip of fabric, this boulges will give me the chance to create the pegs that will connect the sections of the separeted printed parts.
Texturing
In general terms I wanted to show that the garments were created with real animal/creature skin.
For the Bra I chose a leather texture and applied with the surface noise tab.
The cape, and gloves have a more reptile skin look with little scales that give the impression that they belonged to creatures similar to Iguanas or Crocodiles. We can even see that the gloves have a series of spikes that resemble the elongated scales/spines that grow on Iguanas’ backs.
The boots were created applying two different kinds of leather. For each boot I used a leather texture similar to the skin of a pig. The three plates of leather have a thicker look, I used the scaly texture of the back of a crocodile, the main idea is that they are strong enough so their function is to give protection to each leg, maybe she had to kill a big reptile or dragon to get those pieces.
To apply all of the texures it was necessary to create uv maps of each pieces, these maps were created inside of Zbrush using the UV master plugin and a low poly version of each garment.
I really recommend you to spend some time with uv mapping in order to have evenly distrubuted textures that don’t distort in certain areas.
The alpha textures used are part of an animal skin pack with 201 textures.
Thank you for reading this new entry, in the future I’ll be showing you the polypainting phase and the base design.
May Zbrush be with you.