Practice 1: Development 1 – 3D Printing (D1 – 4)

Overskirt Hole Tests

One of the major things I’m still trying to resolve on this project is the holes in Laudna’s skirt hemline. Because I intend to both create the character digitally and 3D print her, they’ll need to be backed by geometry, but I’d also like to be able to bake a high-poly version with opacity onto my nicely-topologized low res model. Luckily, it seems to work fairly similarly with either a real hole or a simple indentation when it comes to baking, as long as I set the bake distance to a higher value.

Otherwise, I spent a bunch of time this week tweaking minor sections of Laudna’s clothing to better match the concept art. Her shirt and corset are sitting asymmetrically on her body, so I achieved this effect with loads of invisible tacks. For her skirt, I created a frozen plane (to be hidden later) and tacked the underlying petticoat to that, guaranteeing the perfect skirt flourish in every simulation.

Pâté and Posing

The character has an incredible in-game moment that inspired me to create a more dynamic pose for my sculpt: “About this time, you see rubber bands snap from each of Laudna’s tips that go to his head and each of his four limbs, and they kind of look like rubbery black sinew. She lifts him up and kind of starts puppeting him. ‘Oh, hello, I’m Pâté de Rolo, pleasure to meet you!'”

I also quickly whipped up her raven-headed-rat accessory in ZBrush and played around with posing in Marvelous. As per usual, I’m frustrated with the native posing tools, but after a LOT of time holding my hand up in a mirror, I think I like the general shapes she’s creating. I’m glad I decided to go with her marionette pose rather than the less striking pose from the concept art.

And that’s all of Laudna’s clothing and her main accessories finished!