Elves, dwarfs, undeads, mages, warriors, shamans...
in one word: Fantasy.

Day 1

General character concept

She's a young warrior, with only some experience in the battlefields, so her dresses n' weapons are some sort of basic gear: leather, metal and iron with a little "tribal" touch.
Her gear isn't a brand new one, so scratches and some dirt are all around the dresses.

The weapon she's using is a blade/shield: she can block melee attacks and attack with the same weapon.

In the beginning I was thinking to give her two of those weapons, but in the final shot the left weapon was covering most of the middle body... probably she will have both in the animations.

Day 2

Body and props modeling

The cloths are mostly extracted polys from the body to maintain a nice and belivable shapes.

This time I didn't use Zbrush for the UVs and the texturing, I did them with Modo and all the rest (with some tweaking) in XSI.

All the textures were grabbed from photos around the internet and tweaked in photoshop.

Some screenshots of the texture I've used for the diffuse, specular, reflection maps.

Day 3

The following renders are different times during the modeling/shading session.

Day 4

The fur is completely done in XSI, using the basic XSI Hair module.

 

The hairs and the eyebrows were done exctracting the head's interested polys with a weight map for the fur density.
Then the hair style with some move/smooth/move/smooth redundant tweaking.
Various XSI's crashes during the hairstyling session (boring as hell) ... but finally I had the result I wanted: long hairs flowing down the shoulder.

The render raw colors are quite near the color mood I wanted for the final shot, the color correction was quite fast.

Day 5

The goal of this project was to make a complete character for animations so Kehel was fully rigged using the XSI's basic rig and with the shapemanager she has a little set of expressions: serious, menacing, curious, smiling and screaming.

Day 6

I did a turntable to see how the shaders reacts to different light angles.

The renderings are with an hdr map, to give the the reflections a semi-realistic reaction.

I didn't use FG due to the massive increasing time of the renderings, just a light setup with 7 different kind of lights.

(360° render of the "in progress" model)

med-resolution turntable (578x600 - 6.6mb)

The boots and the left glove were really ugly so I trashed them and modeled new ones, more "tribal elf style".