Odin

Odin

This character was for me. I purposely left a slot open for a burly Viking dude and out the other end of that came Odin! 

This guy was meant to designed within a day but ended up taking a few as my initial plan of doing a typical muscular armour-clad barbarian evaporated as I took it a little more seriously. One of the first major design mile stones was adding a belly. Basically he's this old war hero who earned his crown through legendary feats and deeds, but after sitting the throne all he did all day was sit and listen to the common-folk whine about a lack of crops or missing geese all the while continuing to eat as much as he did when he was a warrior which resulting in him cultivating a little too much mass around the belly. Still needed to look like he could rip a man's head off though. 

So the overall theme of him was 'big'. The belt is thick and heavy looking, the sword is wide and ridiculously oversized, the antlers are a massive 'Hey, look at me!' and the cape lends itself to blocking out his frame. I even aimed to get this across with his boots by making them with right-angles (considered to add strength in composition).

Process

Same as Thor's:

-Base mesh in Max

-Sculpt in Zbrush

-Retop in Max

-Unwrap in Max

-Texure in Photoshop testing textures in UDK

-Final texture tweaks done in 3DCoat (will talk more about it in Fenrir's post)

-Rig in Max

-Render in Marmoset

Hindsight

This guy got off to a great start. I had the head sculpt done in four hours, and the rest with in a couple days, re-topping and unwrapping was all on schedule (under a week) but then I presented my work where I received some very good criticisms. This was only meant to be a week more of work to cut in however it ended up being two. There were exterior reasons which affected this as well but mostly it was the fur taking a lot longer than I had anticipated (a recurring theme for me). Firstly I didn't know how to go about it; do I use alphas? Do I sculpt it or just model it in? Alphas weren't working very well initially so I ended up trying sculpting and just making yet all looked terrible! Despair was settling in a little when I decided to give alphas another go, which thankfully turned out quite nicely. Although my technique has improved since then so they look a little hammy looking back.

Critiques are good.

Other than that Odin was a pretty awesome experience that served to bolster my confidence quite a bit. Which I really needed haha. Very proud of this.

Where to go from here

Post coming soon