Sword Dancer Mee-Sun

Goals and Inspirations

This was a project made with the intention of merging my 3D knowledge with my painting skills in an artwork based on the paint-over technique. The central character of this project was Mee-Sun a sword fighter based on the sword dancers of the Korean Geommu of traditional sword dance and the Ssang geom an ancient set of techniques for sword fighting with two equally sized swords.

Concept Development

Starting with some construction, to the lineart and finally developing the volume using grayscale. I developed the pose, the clothing and the character likeness, based on historical and dramatized sources to preserve some key elements of the dance and the military background.

Beginning of the 3D process

For the initial stages of the 3D development, I started working on Blender first by trying to match a body to the construction reference and then build in low poly most of the elements. Finally I sent the model to Z-Brush to start sculpting.

Sculpting Stage

When working on this project I was still quite unfamiliar with the workflow on Z-Brush so this particular stage was the most difficult to me and I had to rework a lot of the things while trying to finish it

Once I was satisfied with certain elements I keep moving the mesh between Blender and Z-Brush to develop some geometry faster and keep the edge in the hard surface objects.

Hair and Face Details.

While most of the process was smooth sailing the face and hair proved to be more difficult than expected so I had to rework them a lot, and in the end I spent a lot more detail on them.

Textures and Rendering

I hand painted all the sculpture using Poly paint and then in Blender I developed procedural materials for most of the objects.

Then I did some tests with Blender and renders to have something to finally paint on top. 

Final result

With the final render I went to Adobe Photoshop to paint on top, finally adding some texture, developing the face a bit more, making the values a bit softer and the artwork brighter in general.