Week 22 - Vampire Gnoll "Kakx" Sculpt & Resin Print

 

Sculpting

Over the break I got a chance to speak with Zuccarello about printing some sculpts in the 3D print lab, as a result I wanted to make a momento to test this out. In light of my Icewind Dale Dungeons & Dragons campaign going on a 3 week hiatus over break, it became the object of my obsession.

I decided to sculpt my favorite villian, and enemy we were currently in the middle of fighting; Kakx. A Vampiric Gnoll (Humanistic hyena) who had been terrorizing the party since the start of the campaign. He became a form of mirror for my character Purah and a beloved character of mine.

Character Summary:

Tekeli-li was a gnoll vampire, and a former Fang of Yeenoghu that lurked in Icewind Dale during the 14th and 15th centuries DR. Tekeli-li was once a mortal gnoll, who led his pack across the frozen lands of Icewind Dale. In the Year of the Striking Falcon, the local Reghedmen barbarians routed the pack, forcing them to flee across the Reghed Glacier. To ensure their survival, the pack sacrificed themselves one by one to their Fang Tekeli-li, granting him sustenance to live through the winter.
To the goddess Auril, Tekeli-li's ravenous hunger represented the unending "consumption" of winter. Auril interred the vampiric gnoll within the Caves of Hunger, imprisoning him in the ice of the Reghed Glacier as the passageway out froze over. He remained trapped there for over a century until a group of adventurers re-opened the passageway.

WIP sculpt before critique.

He suffers in this example from being too wolf-like as I was still figuring out the correct mix of fur and flesh to give the illusion that fur was not just dotted over patches of skin.

I looked a lot at the work of Chloe Worthy who is known for turning video game characters into different animals, her most popular series being Red Dead Redemption

This was also a very interesting project as one of my mentees was going through a similar struggle of finalizing their Modeling 2 project at the same time, which also happened to be a wolf/human bust and utilized a lot of the same resources as me when it came to fur texturing

A big resource I relied on a lot in this process was the combination of dynameshing and zremeshing the fur into the main body to achieve a seamless look. This tip by Mark Lambert was a literal game changer.

I really dont think this project would have gotten done without some fantastic critique from my buddy Caden, who helped me block out many of the problem areas of the face I was struggling with and narrowed it down to a misunderstanding of how the planes of the face opperated.

One of the other challenges of this project was based around how little art/official reference there was for this character. Due to the nature of D&D, my version of Kakx is entirely different from someone else playing the same campaign. In the official books - his name isnt even Kakx, but Tekeli-li, where he shows up at the end of the adventure for his one appearance rather than the villian-of-the-week style battles we get with him. Big shoutout to April Prime for his key and concept art

These are all the official art appearances he has

Reference/inspo board

I would also like to shout out David Blanco and Ali Sadeghi for their awesome teeth IMM brushes, because the teeth are on full display I really wanted to make sure they were somewhat accurate, but due to the reference images it was hard to wrap my head around the size and shape of his teeth

Printing

Finally the time has come to print Kakx, I used Lychee slicer to prep. This step actually took a couple revisions as I learned more of the complexity that goes into setting up supports. Big shoutout to Zuccarello and this video by VogMan

The final print time ended up being 10hours and 59 minutes for both models.

I actually ended up printing two copies, one for myself and one to give as a gift, however the second copy had a notably large slice taken out of his left side right below his ear. Origionally I thought it might have been some sort of support error, but there is no support that connects right there.

Additionally, there seemed to be some form of orange particlesthat stuck in the creases of his head. Majority of it could be removed with a simple toothbrush, so it was not from the resin vat, but I couldnt find a cause for it.

Final product for now, it just needs paint