Info

Helena the Archer is a project I made for fun. The inspiration behind her came from Korean online game artworks, where beautiful girls dressed in armor and carrying weapons. Of course I also add a little touch of my taste in this artwork. As for the falcon, I simply wanted to make a companion or a pet for her. The softwares that I used are 3d Studio Max 9 for modeling, Deep Paint 3D and Photoshop for texturing and compositing , and also Vray for rendering.

Concept Design

These are my concepts for Helena the Archer. Few tweaks were done for the armor. There’s no particular concept or reference for the face, I just tweaked proportions until I am satisfied with it. At first I wanted to make an eagle as her pet ( as you can see in this early concept ) but initially I changed it to falcon, simply because there is already many artwork involving eagles. I also wanted to make the falcon as a mount but dropped this idea and only made it as her companion.

Modeling

The modeling part is the most time consuming of all. First I model her full body including simple hair and clothes. Then after some suggestions from friends, I tweaked the body into a better and more mature proportions.

The technique that I used were polygon modeling. I modeled half of her body and face, and then applied a symmetry modifier and Turbosmooth on top of my model. For the armors, I model them from a single plane, and then I cut and connect the edges to follow the shape in my concept. Last, I applied a shell modifier to give a thickness to it.  Same technique applied to other props like her belts and straps.Hairs are done with plane and opacity maps. Eyebrow and eyelash are also done with the same technique. I find this faster than using hair and fur in max.