Empress Ming - Flash Gordon contest

I lot happened since the last update. I wanted to do a real time character but struggled with a lot of components so I did the High Resolution Sculpt instead.  Overall I did enjoyed making this project. I will try to make it game ready in the future and add some texture into it. :)

Side note: For the pillars, I made some alpha to with the sculpting!

Whoa a lot happened since the last update. Here is a breakdown of what I've done:

I started with the sculpt of the body. I focused the sculpt on the face / neck, hands, belly and calf as they will show on the final results. I gave the character a petite body shape. The ears are merely there to help me with the face proportion and I added some irises for the eye position.

After I was happy with the base sculpt, I extracted with the mask part of her neck to begging the sculpting of the hair in her hood. They will helped me position the hood. 

For her hood I used Sean Forsyth's tutorial (https://youtu.be/L7do9s2XC4g). It was nice to work with the cloth simulation! At this point I did some back and forth between the hair and the hood for the position. 

The clothes were easy, I used the mask/extract method and then used the Move Brush for the deformation. 

The straps were really tricky. I tried to used some IMM brushes at first but couldn't really figured how to wrap it around the hair the way I wanted... I got a breakthrough when I used the mask / extract method. I then ZRemeshed it to the lowest setting, deformed Polish by Crisp Edges and a bit of relax to make the edge smooth. I then used the ZModeler Brush to remove the unwanted geometry, Used the Move Topology brush to position it and then poof you got some low poly straps. :D 

To help me with the sculpting, I begin with creating some basic orographic front view. It also helped familiarize myself with the proportion of the character. I based the height of the character according to the concept art. I calculated around 6 heads.

I then begin sculpting in Zbrush using the orthographic view previously created. I also used IMM BParts to help me with the body proportions. As for the hair pillar, I sculpted it in Maya.