"SMALL SOLDIERS | War For The Nekron" Proof of Concept- ZEDHARA
The design of Zedhara needed to have a very strong pressence, like a high religious figure, or a witch.
Her face looks devious and exotic, I added some falcon traits to the design.
The wing sculpt is one of my favourite parts. The black nekron, while still keeping it's usual flowing design, resembles feathers in this character and works very well.
The minions were a lot of fun and a big challenge as well, throughout the whole process. I wanted them to look fun and share design traits with her.
When opened, the wings have a very imposing silhouette, and we can see Zedhara's inner armor, she looks very agile and athletic.
The idea for the armor was to make her llook like she was some kind of technological suit before nekronization.
The back view shows very well how the wings grow.
The nekron hand looks like some kind of translucent plastic lit from withing. The technical trick behind this is just a smartly painted polypaint that indicates which areas have emissive. This is true for all Nekron symbols as well.
When the wings are not supporting the minions, can be folded into very cool and aggressive shapes.
Closer look on the hand. You can see how the painted emissive tries to give the impression of different led lights have been placed in the interior of the hand and forearm.
The full character uses the procedural material I developed. Which works with polypaint from Zbrush.
Model from Zbrush.
Turnaround from Zbrush.
Turnaround from Zbrush.
[DISCLAIMER: Small Soldiers War for the Nekron is a Proof of Concept project in which our team was hired by Comadran Studios to create a set of toy characters during some months from 2022-2023. The conclussion of the project was the Proof of Concept trailer that brought those new characters to life. We would like to clarify that our team does not own these characters and we do not know what comes next for them after the this Proof of Concept. Designs and story might not represent the final product as they are subject to change during production.]
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Zedhara was designed, modeled and rigged by me.
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Zedhara's development was the most difficult one, she started with a completely different design that you can see in my Concept Art post. But since that design didn't fit too well with how the idea of the Nekronites evolved, I decided to redesign her completely from scratch. The result is this bird like alien race, you can see she had some kinf of technologically advanced armor at the time of her Nekronization, and now the armor merges in an organic way with the rest of the body. Her wings transformed in small armed minions that protect her and attack at her command. In the lore, the small nekron propelers below their wings (visible in the zbrush screenshot) allow her to fly, the toy can't fly though.
The rigging and sculpting of the character were done together, since everything needed to work like a puzzle, it was very challenging, but in the end I think she became one of the most impressive characters in the cast, with her ability to open her robe as wings and deploy minions.