Clothes

Technically, I started working on Laudna’s clothing during the original 3D print week (I was excited to jump back into Marvelous!), but haven’t had a chance to gather up my progress photos until now. Laudna’s base garments were fairly straightforward, as her shirt and skirts aren’t particularly fitted, although I did have to work out how to force the shirt under the tight-fitting corset without adding too much bulk. Her shoes presented a bit of a challenge, as they’re something I’ve never patterned before, but I was able to reference basic ballet flats and tweak them from there.

For Laudna’s skirts, I made good use of my experimentation with manual pleating and created a few pleats rather than gathers to achieve that A-line silhouette. I’m still trying to decide how to flare out the side of the skirt to better match the concept art – perhaps with a stiffer material preset or a petticoat.

Overall, she still needs some proportion and silhouette tweaks, as the character has slightly in-human proportions, so I think my first task next week will be to adjust the avatar to match.

I started on the belt pouch as well. The basic shapes were very simple, but I ran into many problems trying to create the knot closure and overlapping seams along the bag edges. Eventually, through a lot of selective freezing and a bunch of invisible tacks, I managed to get the knot in place. For the seams, I played around quite a bit with setting the seam angle and offset so there wasn’t too much pressure on opposing pattern pieces.

I also started doing basic experimentation with texturing on exported UVs (the blue squiggly lines are, of course, a placeholder!). Marvelous has a neat system for applying textures generally over a surface, so I was able to play around with a few seamless height maps and torn fabric alphas. Eventually I’ll texture her properly by hand in Substance, but having a PBR system built-in is a nice feature.

Render Progress

This is where I’m at after this week! The first image was rendered using the built-in outline tool for that pattern-cover look, and the second was just rendered normally within the program.

Bibliography

Friederichs, H. (2021). Laudna Character Portrait – Critical Role. [Image]. Available at: https://critrole.com/hype-check-out-our-official-campaign-3-character-art-by-hannah-friederichs-and-jrusar-art-by-clara-daly [Accessed: 4 November 2021].