I made this elf for the Races Of Middle Earth CG Challenge run during January and Febuary 2003.I decided to make a ghostly elf character, sort of like a wraith, that haunts the battleground where the warrior was slain. I took heavy reference from the Prologue sequence from Fellowship Of The Ring - getting most of my designs for the armour and such from the design galleries that come with the Extended DVD boxset of the film. Although I modelled and textured the entire character for the challenge, I had a lot of people enquiring about the armour, so I decided to devote this little area of my website to explain how I put it all together. I started off modelling the torso armour plates by making a cylinder, removing its top and bottom polygons, and then using Extender to create new polys to fold over and inwards to form rims for the seperate plates. I repeated this process along the bottom of the cylinder as well, so that I would end up with a nice folded over plate.
Once I had the basic form, I used the Knife tool, as well as Bandsaw, to adjust the shape into the form that I wanted it in. I tweaked the shape and rotated the cylindrical plate into position. I then copied and tweaked and positioned each plate in turn to create the entire armour suit for the torso area.
As you can see in the image above, I also modelled little leather and metal ring joints to hold the plates together. These had to be carefully positioned into place one by one, as the armour piece is NOT symmetrical at all! Each plate was adjusted individually to allow for the overlapping pattern to work nicely. Each joint piece looked something like this, although each one was obviously adjusted slightly depending on where it was situated on the plates.
Once I had all the little joint pieces in place, and all the plates adjusted and positioned perfectly, I had a model like this
Since the character was supposed to be of rather great antiquity, I decided to mess up the armour a bit. I placed holes and breaks here and there to show that the armour was beginning to fall apart, as well as to show damage that may have been inflicted upon the armour in the battle during which the character had actually been killed.
I also made little adjustments to the little leather straps on the joints, pulling some of them apart and making them detached somewhat from the metal rings, just to create a slightly threadbare look.
