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Hi all,
Here is a making-of for my Dominance War 3 entry. This is an annual game art contest which, this year, gathered more than 1800 entrants in 9 different forums and 5 languages (English, French, Korean, Russian and Chinese). This year topic was basically to create a powerful and magical artefact user.
Few weeks before the contest, I bought an awesome book that gather incredible pictures of abyssal creatures. I also watched Sea Monsters in a Imax theatre recently, as well as Abyss, Sphere… so I was completely in the “abyssal monsters” theme at this time, and it’s all natural that I chose this subject for my entry. I was first thinking of doing a massive humanoid monster from the deep sea who would protect a tiny mermaid. But knowing that the contest was around 7 weeks long, I decided to focus exclusively on the mermaid. Here are the different steps of her creation:
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For the design of my mermaid, I wanted to combine the power of two references: the grace and sensuality of Pascal Blanché’s mermaid, and the frightening look of Harry Potter’s one. So I started in ZBrush with a very simple base mesh created with ZSpheres and posed with the Transpose tool. That’s a very quick work of an hour or two, in order to find an interesting silhouette, then I took a screenshot and brought it back in Photoshop.
In Photoshop, I started to throw some colors, added tentacles, modified the tail, the face… Then I began to make some research on the magical artefact, some attempts being more serious than others ;)
During some time, I wanted to make her amphibious, but once again, time constraints made me give up this idea since that would have required a lot more work to get satisfying results in both fish and biped poses.
After few nights of reflection and research, I decided to stop on this final design and start the modeling process at this point.
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