Inspiration

The inspiration for this image came from the protagonist of the Licia Troisi's novels, Nihal from the Land of the Wind, a young half-elf female warrior. A very popular Italian illustrator, and friend of mine, Paolo Barbieri had created the illustrations for the novels' covers and an illustrated book about the characters in the saga and so it was his image that I used as a starting concept (Fig.01).


My goal was to create a 3D version of the Nihal character.

Modeling

Once I'd prepared the base mesh of the body, I started to model the armor's pieces and clothes, which covered most of the body. Modeling each of these pieces was done in two stages: first a basic modeling stage and then a second modeling stage to bring out more of the details. All the items were done using this same method.

I started with the chest armor and I kept Nihal's body on a separate layer, creating new polygons using Modo's "background constraint" option. This way the new polygons were fitted onto the background mesh (Fig.02).


To model, in addition to the traditional tools, I used a lot of modo sculpting tools directly onto the mesh, which made the modeling process quite fast, very enjoyable and not boring at all. In Fig.03 you can see the chest after the first modeling phase and in Fig.04 the chest after the second modeling phase.




A very fun modeling stage was when I modeled the armor friezes, which were not sculpted, but modeled and applied onto the armor. Even in this case I used the "background constraint” option, as can be seen in Fig.05.


Fig.06 shows the chest's wire details.