Reflection #2 Melina

Just to recall: Melina is the main protagonist who finds herself on an island after surviving a fall from a crashing airship after she was abducted by the rebels. She is the princess of Bedwyr's most dominating kingdom. Throughout the game, she attempts to find the crashed airship to find whether her brother(who was abducted as well) survived the crash. 

The Process: 

Stage 1: A base mesh in ZBrush was used to get the body proportions right, and the body structure was heavily tweaked to carve out features unique to her.

The hero-like clothing(minimally detailed) that was modeled in the initial stage was fed by the narrative of her being imprisoned in the airship. But this look was radically altered as it didn't really convey her identity as a princess. The heroic musculature also didn't strongly add to her royal identity, and so it was decided to lessen up the over-the-top buffed-up look a bit to distinguish her from a typical warrior-like musculature.  

Stage 2: Lowering down the polys was essential in order to blend the character mesh with the environment. Using the Zremesher-Zbrush was helpful to instantly switch between different poly counts, and with solid mesh constructions. It could be a bit annoying to mistakenly leave the 'adapt' switched on whilst also remeshing with 'half' turned on, only to find out that the polys weren't significantly dropping and the selected mesh was deforming. The Zremeshing results were much better and less time-consuming with just 'half' turned on.

Inspiration for the final clothing was drawn from 15th-century European clothing:

I found that one of the quick ways of building cloth in Zbrush was to mask an area on a mesh and extract out a new mesh from that area under 'subtool'. This approach worked well for getting quick cloth rolls, in combination with brushes, of course. There were discrepancies between how meshes made in Zbrush looked in Maya. The faces had to be repositioned in Maya to realign normals properly. 

I used Mixamo to auto-rig the mesh. This was super handy. Although one might want to consider rigging on their own if they have somewhat baggy clothing because on applying a few animations, the mesh tends to look a bit cluttered and sticky. 

More updates to come. Cheers!