Strife! WIP01

The one Darksiders character I really wanted to make while at Vigil but never got the chance to was Strife. I was really looking forward to the possibility of working on Darksiders III with him as the main character (or better yet, 4 player co-op!). Sadly, we never got to that point.

 I've been wanting to explore a few new techniques (mostly hard surface, rendering, surface materials, and hair) and thought why not do a Strife bust! This will be an ongoing project and I'll try to post my progress along the way.

Strife - Here is my reference sheet. The artists shown are:
Joe Mad - JoeMadFan.com
Paul Richards - Autodestruct.com
Ludo Lullabi - LudoLullabi.deviantart.com

I'm going to give my own spin to the character while staying true to his key features. I really liked the shorter nose piece and what I read as oculars on the crest of his helmet in the original piece that Joe drew. I'm also going to work green into him a bit more (mostly his collar). We had started linking key colors to the four horsemen while developing Darksiders II. War was Red, Death was Purple, Strife - Green, and I think we had Fury as Yellow.

Here is where I'm at with him (I will be doing his collar too). He's prepped and ready to go back into ZBrush:

And here is a progress shot of my steps:

• Blank - Quick basic mesh I could throw into ZBrush and get started on fleshing out the design
• DynaMesh - I spent about 20 minutes and roughed in the general shapes I wanted in Zbrush using DynaMesh. At this stage I'm not worried about being perfect at all. I just want to establish my shapes for retopo.
• Retopo - Once I've got my rough sculpt, I retopologize to create a mesh I can take into Max for refinement. Again, in this stage I focus more on speed than making anything perfect. My only real concern is maintaining my quads.
• Base Mesh - I've cleaned up my mesh and have prepped it for a final pass in Zbrush.

Well on to Sculpting!