Hey dudes, heres my entry for comicon this year over at GA.

I picked Valkyrie, but decided 2048 and 12k poly's was an opportunity to cram in way more shit than a viking chick with a braid and spear, so i overhauled her from top to bottom in a style that I enjoyed more.

I took inspiration from Aion, Genzoman's wicked illustrations, Shunya Yamashita's female face illustrations.

Shes under budget at around 11,200 which I was really surprised with at the end, I should have used those extra tris to round out some more of the armour pieces but i didnt really know how heavy the wings were going to be before I actually started blocking them out, in the end they are barely 100 tris each!!

By that time I had literally no time to go back to the mesh and start cutting stuff back in.

Beauty Shot



Presentation Shot



Textures



( Am working on a decent wireframe and a 360 spin to post up so you can get a real sense of scale from her wings etc)

Everything is hand painted except for the light dirt overlay on the metal. And i havent used any renderers for any of these shots - just straight viewport grabs from max using xoliul's badass shader which is totally free for both max and maya.

For my beauty shot I painted smoke using a photoshop smoke tutorial I found on the web, and for the 'particles' I simply found a pic of a night sky with bajillions of stars on it, scaled them up to 3 different sizes and erased which ones i didnt want to help give that illusion of depth.

After working until 4:00am on it i looked at it in the morning and saw that it looks like shes underwater.... doh! but hey thats how I rolled.

Lessons learnt from this comp:

* Wings that work nicely are fucking hard to pull off, no rigger in their right mind would be happy with trying to make what ive done work nicely.. heh.
* Trying to work with a character that has a massive silhouette in its entirety can be frustrating, I want to show her face but that would mean cutting off her wings, or cranking up the perspective or finding some strange angle to shoot her at etc.
* I underestimated the time it would takes to present a character like this.

Some WIPS and other goodies













Thanks for looking dudes, hope you like!

I've already given my praise over on GA but it deserves more.

Easily one of the best pieces I've seen in a long time. That beauty shot goes further than just being a 'good model technically and aesthetically' it's a piece of fucking art dude.

Nice to see a bit of Xoliul action too in a world becoming quickly overpopulated with a certain primate ;p.

Amazing work!
I especially enjoy the work on her face and her beautyfull eyes. Lovely. Also the wings are impressive. I also like the simplicity of her armor. Not overdone with ornaments and such. It fits nicely.

I guess the special effects on her spear in the beauty shot are painted. Or did you some particle effect magic to get the effects into 3d?

This is absolutely insane. Great work!

Simply gorgeous.

Yeah the eyes and the wings are sweet. Great presentation.

love eyes execution..

Brilliant work, those eyes are amazing!

Absolutely beautiful!

The face is one of my favorite parts, especially the eyes and lips!

Also I love the wings. Is each "feather" a plane that you moved the vertexes around for? Sorry I'm new to the modeling scene and was just wondering haha.

Great job anyways!

Great work! Few words about diffuse?

goddam hazardous you cool man, nice work. the slits on the helmet look weird close up but from far away its fine (just limited polys i guess). aussie pride.

Stellar stuff. I am going to put this up in the banner rotation first thing tomorrow morning.

Superb stuff. Was a bit sceptical on the wings of the first image but the others sold it. Love how you managed the skin as well.

Awesome job man! Well done! I don't think the header does this model justice though. Might just be me, but it could be better (the new polycount header, not the model itself!).

Holy crap thanks for the banner guys - totally honored!

Slave Zero: Thanks man, yeah the smoke and particles are added in photoshop after the screengrab - I really like Xoliuls shader, very little post work involved in any shot once some good lights have been setup!

Charlie: Haha yeah man you got it pretty much - each plane is moved around and placed individually until i found the right volume that I was after for the wing. It was much more challenging that i thought it would be, and i imagine it would be alot more challenging to make a wing that actually works well animated - that will be the next step!

Sampson: thanks dude, Your right i should have cut those things out of the helmet - always next time!!

Thanks again guys, stoked you like her

She looks wicked dude. Awesome work!

Sounds incredibly tedious but if the wings turn out as great as yours did I think it's definitely worth it! Thanks for answering as well, I'll give wings ago once I get around to character modeling.

Congratulations on getting top row you deserve it for this awesome piece.

Gotta say man, the first thing I thought when i saw this was Aion, which had stella graphics and you actually made it look better. Those wings and that face are badass

Very cool, congrats!

very purty girly you got there.

Simply amazing, the high to low transferred perfectly, with how the specular is reacting, it at times can look like a cg model, very very nice!

great stuff hazardous! saved off that close up off the face for reference/inspiration : D

simply fantastic! i feel sorry for the judges who have to choose a winner out of all of these

Gonna be the stickler here who says it's boring as hell. The craftsmanship is gr8 but what else?

Awesome work!! And congrats on the banner!