The Journey from 2D to 3D

I've recently worked on a bunch of models to use for enemies in Gloomhaven's Forgotten Circles expansion (as seen on my Gloomhaven Models page), and I thought it might be interesting to write about the process that I used for the Aesther Ashblade, from start to finish.

The first thing that I did was to spend some time appreciating the official artwork for the enemy.  While I was looking at it, I took note of the characteristics that made this enemy type visually distinctive.  In this case, I found myself really focusing on 3 traits: she has her hood up, she's wearing a jacket with asymetrical armor, and she has an excess of blades (so many blades).  The jacket really caught my attention, as it almost looked like a military surplus jacket that you'd see in the real world.

That thought about the jacket really sparked my imagination.  Cephalofair ran an ARG to announce Forgotten Circles, and part of that game involved an Aesther (Cassandra), punching through to our reality and communicating with us.  So, that got me thinking: what if that jacket really is military surplus, and this character picked it up while spending some time in our reality?  I instantly fell in love with that idea, so I decided that I'd run with it when it came time to make that level of detail.  But first, I had to figure out the pose.  This character struck me as being patient and stoic, ready for anything, and I really wanted my character to convey that same sense.

I started out with this character like I do with all of mine: I took a basic "dummy" that I've put together from the vitruvian man and started moving it around.  You can't really see it in this screenshot, but the object origin for each body part is right at the joint where it connects towards the body core, which makes it really easy to pose.  When I want to move an arm around, I just change Blender's Pivot Point to Active Element and then select the forearm and then the upper arm.  At that point, the upper arm is the active element, so when I rotate it, the whole arm moves at the shoulder.  If I want to turn the torso, I just select the whole upper body (and shift click the torso a few times until it's the active element), then move it around.

After playing around with my dummy for a while, I came up with a pose that I liked.  I felt like it was dynamic and energetic, but was still grounded.  Also, I liked the pose because it would give me a chance to do some fun things with the jacket and I could keep the blades of her kukris at angles that would be conducive to printing.  After I had the basics of the pose in place, it was time to begin adding details in to the model.

The very first thing that I did was to make those two kukris, since they're such a distinctive part of the model.  After I made them, I realized that I had created a psuedo Chinese Seung Dao kind of pose, and while I do enjoy my iconic shaolin postures, it just didn't feel right for this character.  So, with the swords in place, I made some more changes until I felt like the model was in a better place.

Once I was happier with the pose, I went back to adding more detailed body parts to the model.  Since the kukris were already there, the next most distinctive feature that I wanted to make was the jacket, so I worked on that.  I played around with a bunch of ways to make the jacket, but I ended up just making a cube and extruding faces to get the basic shape, then adding a Subdivision Surface modifier to it to smooth everything out.

It took me quite a while to get the shape of the jacket right, but once it was on there, it immediately gave the model some life that had just been lacking before.  In the past, I've extruded sleeves from jackets/robes like this, but that was really difficult to manage and limited my ability to tweak the pose after the fact.  So, this time, I decided that I'd just leave the arms as separate objects and would sculpt them to look like sleeves.

The next distinctive trait that I wanted to make was the hood, which I did in a very similar fashion to the jacket.  I just made a cube and extruded faces, then scaled them, then extruded again, then did a ring cut, then moved stuff around... it's a slow and steady process (Miguel Zavala is a master of it, so check out some of his videos to learn some techniques), but it eventually resulted in a fairly nice looking hood.  Once again, I decided to go for that anachonistic, somewhat modern look, by having the hood come up from inside the jacket instead of making it part of a larger cowl (even though the official artwork went the cowl route).


With the hood created, all three of my major characteristics were in place... but I hadn't really accomplished an excess of blades.  I'd barely even managed an adequacy of them!  So, I set about making more swords and knives, and adding various straps to hold them in place.  This is also when I added that shoulder armor, since I was strapping things up regardless ;)

That gave me all of my major elements, so it was time to start adding on the minor things.  You know, the little things that people don't even notice that they notice.  Things like hands, feet, and a face ;)

So, I went through a detail pass, just adding whatever cool little details I could think of to make the model more interesting.  I added ridges to the edge of the coat and the armor, I sculpted folds and ripples into the cloth for her pants/jacket/hood, and added some rings to the straps where they intersect to imply some kind of joining system was in place to hold them together.  I also added some pockets, to really drive home that military surplus jacket image!

With the model built, it was time to start really thinking about how it was going to get printed.  During the modelling process, I'd tried to keep printing in mind by having the kukri tips pointed not towards the printing bed and generally trying to make multiple points of contact for extremities wherever possible, but now I had to start thinking about the little realities, like support.

And, fortunately, supporting this model was a lot easier than many of my other ones!  I loaded it up in Meshmixer and used my standard techniques to design some supports for the model.  I ran into some issues with legs coming loose during the print on both of my Valrath models, so I forced the bases from some of these support trees to slightly overlap with the heel of this model's foot, giving it a larger footprint (badum tish) and importantly, better bed adhesion.

With my supports designed, I loaded it up in Slic3r and checked out the print preview... which helped me find a bunch of spots on the model that didn't have enough support.  So, I bounced between Meshmixer and Slic3r a few times until the print preview looked clean, then I crossed my fingers, exported the gcode, and copied it over to my printer.

Success!  On my first try!  I don't think that I've ever before managed to successfully design supports for a complex mini on my first try!  I mean, I did do those Slic3r print preview iterations, but since they didn't consume any plastic, I don't think that they count :P

Removing the supports went pretty well for this model (either that, or I'm starting to get good at this process).  I used my x-acto knife to sever the interfaces between the supports and the model, then the support trees came away in 3 or 4 chunks after I started snipping the bases apart (which allowed me to get in deeper with my knife).  Removing the supports from the downward angled sheathes was a bit tricky (I snapped one of them off), but I found that cutting downwards (towards the end of the sheathe) did a really good job of knocking loose the support while protecting the model.  All told, it took me about 5-10 minutes to remove the supports from each model.

Of course, once the support was removed, I still had a lot of cleanup work to do.  As you see in this photo, there was a moderate amount of stringing (it was worst between the head and the grip of her big sword) that I had to melt away with my soldering iron.  The underside of the jacket's hem had a few loose spots, too, which I melted back together (although there were fewer than I was expecting).  I probably spent another 5-10 minutes with each figure, using the soldering iron to remove blemishes and strings and stuff.

After I'd completed the bulk of the cleanup, it was time to prime the models for painting.  I usually prime my models with a grey primer, because it's easy to paint over.  In this case, because Aesther have such an extreme look, I decided to use black primer.
 

My painting technique was to prime everything black, then brush on silver paint in an aggressive highlighting pass (painting far more than I would for real highlighting, but leaving the deepest shadows black).  After that, I used my Ghost Tint paints (which are a fairly glossy, semi-transparent set of paints) to color that silver with the ephemeral Aesther aesthetic.  I used a purple on the darker parts of the model, like inside the jacket and under the legs, then I used a blue over most of the body in general (making sure to layer it over the purple in places, so that I'd get a transition between the two).  I finished it off with "plasma fluid", which is a brilliant teal, going over the tops of things in a more traditional highlighting pass.  Once they were all painted, I hit them with a glossy clear-coat, and then put them onto my bases!