Week 57 - Unicorn Cleric Sculpt & What It Means to Create

 Alright... It's time we ran it back.

Its been a minute since I've been here. At the end of April my mother passed away very suddenly during spring finals, I've spent the time since adjusting and learning to stand on my own feet. Learning what it means to love and to create something you're passionate about.

I feel this context is important, I don't know who reads this, but you don't need to be perfect all of the time. You can hate your work, your art, and even yourself but you owe it to your past and future self to keep fighting.

One of the people who helped me significantly is my friend Caden, I've mentioned him several times for critique or discussion. During one of our many, many, late night talks he said to me:

"Fighting for a reason is different than fighting over nothing. Fighting can mean you care"

Caden and I met as coworkers during tutoring, but Caden is also my Game Master for my 2025 D&D Curse of Strahd campaign. He has come to know me through my character, Arwyn, a Aasimar Cleric of the Dream Court, a magical place that controls the ebbs and flow of dreams throughout the different planes of existence. When I first wrote him, he was nothing more than a good man, a musician, who was being sent by his goddess into a world he did not know.

Arwyn is not a good man anymore.

Throughout the story progression, Arwyn has had to come to reality that he is a flawed, sometimes cowardly or selfish, man. Arwyn has made me realize things about myself. He has helped me through this dark period in my life. You don't count the days rotting, or the time the sun has come and gone, even the meals stopped being counted. You counted the days until Kc could rest and Arwyn could take over, if only for a few hours.

In my two month break from any significant game dev work, and at the encouragement of faculty, I focused on illustration, anything to keep me creative and working. In two months I created 53 pieces of unique art, Arwyn was always amongst the most popular subject. During this time I focused heavily on rebuilding my fundamentals of art and targeting where I struggled. I did a lot of anatomy studies and different rendering practices to improve. Different methods. Different ideas. Consistently.

Now, being back at FIEA, I turn back to Arwyn, being reminded of all that Purah was to me and how I can once again, be better. Now, lets get into it;

To understand why I did this project, we first need to identify some problems with the Purah model I made;

1. Her legs are straight down rather than bending back in a digitigrade fashion
2. I wasn't set on clothing designs which caused me to go through many iterations and have to create everything in Zbrush
3. General green-ness to Zbrush caused many mesh errors, such as her head/body being seperate and frequent dynamesh errors on her antlers.
4. Posing her was, to put frankly, a gigantic pain in the ass because of reason 3 and near impossible.

I will admit, the speed Arwyn's sculpt was assisted with re-using several older projects that were abandoned or sketches, such as the digitigrade legs from week 40, that are actually made for a sketch of Kindred from League of Legends. These focused largely on the muscle groups so I could add fat/hair where necessary depending on the model being made.

Here is Purah's model with them adapted to her torso. You can see how the muscles are blended out but still retain enough information to be readable. This is the base version of Arwyn that would be modified.

Additionally, I went back to week 35 and nabbed his head that I sculpted as a demo for one of my students. Still one of my favorites.

Combining the two projects was a bit harder than anticipated as I wanted Arwyn to be physically much larger than Purah both in height and width while remaining proportional to his legs, he is 6'5-7ft (before horn) in our game and Purah is 6'2 (before antlers)

Overall he has wider shoulders and larger arms, a different style of hoof (deer vs horse), and is significantly taller. Please note I'm using the final version of his body for this comparisons because I took the pictures after.

Awesome! That theoretically solves #1 and #3, #4 we should be okay for, but that's not something I'll know yet, so what about #2?

Let me introduce you to: Marvelous Designer, aka my new best friend until the end of time. "Why wasn't I using this for Purah?" you might ask... I'll let my best friend Colby explain for me:

Thank you Colby.... I'll remember this.

Anyway, after pressing many buttons and creating terrible abominations to fashion kind, I was able to create a pattern for his typical adventuring gear - yes this is what he wears while facing the Horrors™, fae unicorn man, after all -- by using a proxy model of his body. I didn't worry about the hair in this as I presumed the longer strands would get in the way rather than helping.

The irony in this is that I actually do have three professionally created and illustrated outfits for Arwyn that I like to put him in, however spite is a powerful motivator and all of my friends demand to have a reference for this one specifically. Please note I'm using the final version of his outfit for this because I took the pictures after.

By the end of day 1, this was my current progress and we were several weeks ahead of progress compared to Purah with harvesting previous projects and Marvelous Designer.

From here, my progress becomes a bit harder to track as I slept and did a second pass on his body and clothes. A lot of this time was spent simplifying shapes, adding accessories and gear, and tweaking small parts of the design I wanted to see changes on. At the current point, everything still needs at least one or two touch ups, but I wanted to get significant critique before jumping into the finer details of things.

References:

As a side quest, I also wanted to learn more about how far I could push Marvelous Designer and have since been using Purah's model to make dresses for some of the other characters I would eventually like to make. For a redo of Purah's model, I designed a dark fairy-court style dress for one of my discord communities under the prompt 'Umbra'

I learned a lot through this mini-project, mainly how puckering and internal lines can be used in MD. I'm hoping to get this all rendered out by next week for a proper showcase :)