Emperor and Concubines: beginning a new year of work

A picture showing how much work I've completed on the Emperor and his concubines so far, and plans for the work to come as we enter the new year.

I've reached the stage with these characters where I'm forced to put them in their final poses before I can continue sculpting details like skin wrinkles and, even more so, cloth.

Hooray for transpose master

Today we started arranging our existing models into very rough poses just to make our pre-vis animation a little more interesting for the hand-in tomorrow, and have discovered that it is indeed possible to do all the posing in ZBrush. We had been biting our nails a bit over this, wondering whether we would have to spend lots of time rigging and skinning.

All the examples below were created in less than half hour each, and very little additional sculpting has been done to correct artifacts of the transpose process. With more time invested, this method is certainly suitable for the film, and incredibly fast.

Obviously for the final poses where we spend more time, the poses will be more dynamic and detailed.

Emperor's Concubines

Here's my work so far on the emperor's concubines. Their grotesqueness is meant to represent the corruption of the society that exists around this arena and moment in time, in that weird ideals of beauty are a fairly good sign of a civilisation going to pot. Thus, they both have weak chins and fairly saggy bodies.