Hi all!
I spent some time doodling around trying to figure out what I wanted to do -- mostly because I felt like this was a good opportunity to do something else totally random, haha. I definitely wanted to do something stylized, so part of it is figuring out how far I can push the base mesh and that kind of thing -- I didn't want to go too outlandish for my first attempt at using CC, so stuck to a character that was reasonably human. This was what I came up with -- I kept calling her druid (for whatever reason) so that's what I've decided she is. I know I need a lot more practice making accessories and outfits, so I figured I'd probably end up spending more time on that to make it feel right. 

Looking forward to actually getting to work on CC, but I think I need to go watch a few more tutorials first! Based on my past experience in 3d stuff, I don't think it'll take me too terribly long to get the base mesh adjusted to her proportions, so that will probably be the next update I have. I might also need to go and design her floating crown/antler thing a bit more, so  that might be in there as well.

Hey not bad as a first reference ! I'm having Hunter X Hunter vibes. Don't know if that's on purpose ahah. What software did you use to draw ?

Hi @onyxserpent
Just also remember besides the character, our judges also cares about the body poses and facial expressions ;-)
Great reference and good luck!

@Kalex I just drew it in Photoshop! I believe it was just hard round brushes on color layer masks (I find it makes it super easy to erase without getting all smudgy). Definitely had the symmetry tool on though, I was having a lot of fun with it that day, haha.

@Eric C (RL) Yep! I just wanted to be able to get going on it, I'm thinking of some cool poses and stuff to have when it's finalized.


Part of the trick is just figuring out the limitations of CC, but considering I haven't used it before, I think I made a fair amount of progress just getting it to be kind of in the right universe. I'm not sure if I missed an option to sculpt more detail in Zbrush or if final detail in Painter or what... But hey, better than nothing for starting.

Finally got CC4 to totally cooperate and moved stuff into Zbrush to sculpt away -- or rather do most of the blockout process. Already decided her hair, crown, belt buckle, and a few other details like that are things I'm just going to build in Blender since it has better tools for lofting curves or otherwise being super precise. I probably have another day of just doing sculpting stuff to get the cloth details before hopping into Blender for retopo on those + the other details I need to get done. I haven't done much Zbrush work in the last month so everything felt kind of alien while I was just getting going, haha. The boots I might also 100% redo in Blender. Not happy with how they look, and it might be another case where "yeah sure you can do that in Zbrush, but my brain doesn't think that's the ideal path" kind of thing.

I kind of was updating elsewhere and forgot to post here too, haha. OOPS. Final post ended up being: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qJ9xVR
Check that out if you wanna see the final images! I'm just posting WIP images here.


I think this is where I left off. I did retopology and made the hair at about the same time. It actually went way faster than expected, but I still have a lot to learn about hair modeling I think. I wish that Blender weight paints translated to CC4, but from my research it looks like it doesn't. I would have rigged the hair properly if that had been the case. Hopefully that's a feature that can be added in the future because though it's not like Blender's weight paint thing is amazing, it's still better than the CC4 one.



Substance painter time! I was really happy with the tones I got on the character base. I kind of want to go and finish the spot pattern across her whole body, but that'll be for some other time. I think I'm to the point in Substance painter where half the issue is just figuring out what's the ideal way to approach a task rather than where the tool is hiding, which is good, but still means there's a lot to learn. Still, happy with the result.



And bonus content. My bird was being a gremlin assistant while I was trying to put everything together for the final.