Banshee and Heliotrope

Banshee

"Far, far away something made a single ghostly howl, like a banshee in the dark." 

                                                                                                                Lucy Christopher

With this project, I wanted to challenge my ability to design a fully original character, partially inspired by the folklore of the Banshee. Only in a little more fantastic and less orthodox fashion.

The idea was to give her a menacing yet odly disturbing look. The impossibility to make eye contact, the genuine smile and the blood are painting the picture of an entity you should probably hope to never meet.

My "reference cloud" (as I like to call it). At least the cleaned-up version for this submission.

A little mock-up  of composited still.

Skin detailing was manually done in Zbrush, using some custom brushes and alphas, striving for a controled amount of realism while keeping a touch of the stylized nature of my concept.

The groom was handled using Xgen core. For the lookdev, I experimented with a layering of shaders using Arnold aiLayerShader node, to be able to have surfaces with different properties on the same mesh (Skin, blood, paint).

Above is an example of this, with the shading network of the body.

Heliotrope

This is a portrait study I did a few months back. Name's Heliotrope, as in the flower (the purple one).

Everything was modeled in Zbrush, the texturing was done in Mari aside from the micro-detailing of the skin.

That's all for me folks, I hope you've enjoyed this set of characters I've done these past few months ! I certainly learned a ton in the process, and plan to make many more of those that will yeld much progress in the future ! 

Robin.