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I made a Summer skin for Anduin, a new mount and updates to Summer Jaina
The Nexus Island Getaway: Grab your sunscreen, the Nexus is heading to the beach
- a summer skin for Anduin
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/DxrDaE- updates to Jaina's skin, mostly textures (here's a now and before of the face), I also reduced the size of her Umbrella by 25% and her custom animations now play in the model viewer
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rRV636- and the Nexpa: Bolt mount, this one is 100% from scratch my own creation because I thought those tiny scooters are really nice for a beach outing
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/RYPk5mYes, I renamed the skins from Sun's Out Guns Out to something more fitting.
I don't know if you're interested but I'm gonna share my thoughts on this little trilogy of mine.
I started these as an exercise on how to create skins - taking an existing skeleton and animations, adding new geometry and making it work. This was very much experimentation and learning. I'm a graduating art student who wants to be part of the industry and help make cool content for you guys out there in the gaming world. So this was like "ok this works, now this is broken, well this is not how this goes, how does Blizzard do it? Is that right?" all the way through. While the base mesh for the skins is the triangulated one you extract from casc, all the retouching, re-sculpting, additional modeling, retopology, UVs, skinning was done by myself. I also painted every single texture with the exclusion of alphas and taught myself how to use a new program to paint, that's why I also updated Jaina's texture. Since they're skins I could've taken their existing face textures and painted around those to keep everything as close to the original as possible, but would've felt shady for doing so because I didn't have permission from Firstkeeper in the case of Anduin. So I sat there for some time and just painted his face from scratch (same for Jaina) as closely as possible. Hopefully they're alright.
What I was going for was just...chill...skins. Nothing too complicated or wacky, just light summer attire. Also for Anduin I was thinking of a bunch of different things to do with his sword and ultimately ended up going with Inflatable Shalamayne. Why? DID SOMEONE SAY [Inflatable Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker]. The thing is, his original sword is held by his breastplate and the sheath on his back, I didn't want to obscure his chest by a strap like Hanzo, so my idea was he taped some Velcro on the back and that's how it sticks to his shirt, if however you decide to roll with the shirtless variant (I made that because why should Tychus be the only one??) then you just have to suspend disbelief.
The color variants for the skin are inspired by major cities/regions and I originally wanted to keep the theme of "Human areas" going but decided I'd get more "fun" hair colors if I had something like a night elf or blood elf variant, there was a pink haired Exodar Anduin but he didn't make the cut...for now. I didn't add any designs to the shirt because his pants already had so much I felt like it would be overload.
When it came to references I really had a challenge with Anduin's body type. He's athletic after all, sword training with Greymane, he lugs around that plate armor for all of BFA........but he's not a warrior. He's a PRIEST. But he's a WoW character. So I had to find a balance of totally SHRRRRRREDDED like Zul'jin and no muscle at all. I referenced Leo in Romeo and Juliet because he reminds me a lot of Anduin and in that movie he wore a lot of Hawaiian shirts so it worked out. I did add a little bit more definition just so it wouldn't look too flat.
And that's pretty much it. This is the end of my little personal trilogy. Hope you like it.
KinaBREW
You put a lot of effort into these and it shows. Suns out Guns out was a really fun pack and we would love to revisit it and who wouldn't love an Inflatable Thunderfury Blessed Blade of the Windseeker.
I'm glad you built everything from scratch. It's the best way to learn. If you're not making mistakes then you're not able to improve. I did it. I still do it. You'd be hard pressed to find an artist that doesn't learn something from everything they do. Awesome ideas and you did really well in the way you showcased them with animations. Presentation is 9/10ths of the law.... I think that's how it goes.
Some things that we tend to keep in mind when doing skins where we start removing armor. We tend to bulk up the character quite a bit. For example. Janitor Leoric has a lot of armor normally. For this skin we had to take a Janitor coverall and give it more mass than a skeleton posing as a janitor would have. We also had to give him some sort of shoulder pad to make up for the mass as well. This is where we have to kinda get a little creative. You still want the character to be recognizable from game view while retaining most of the silhouette. It gets tricky sometimes.
Keep it up!