Making of the Blood elf

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"Making of the Blood elf " by Ziv Qual

This tutorial will covers some of the interesting steps of producing this image.
starting with what sparked the idea, and covering the modeling, texturing, rendering and compossiting.
I will also share a few tips and tricks as I show the process.

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Concept and inspiration

Not much to say here.
After quite a long time of no free-time personal projects, I run across a sketch of a blood elf from Blizzard and I was flooded with inspiration. I then gathered a few more sketches by samwise and at a certain point I had a very clear picture in my mind on the whole composition and on very specific things like the armor’s design. I should note that the sketches sparked it for me and helped my inspiration run, but I was in no way trying to duplicate it, I wanted to give it my own design.

Modeling

The Blood elf is all about layers of objects on top of each other. I’ve started with a generic male model which I already had and used just as reference. The first thing I modeled was the base robe underneath everything, when I was happy enough with it I got rid of the body model. I then started modeling all the parts of the armor going from chest to bottom, then the shoulder parts, the mask, and all the parts of the cape. Like I said, all the parts are laying on each other so I had to be able to keep going back to objects and easily tweak them again and again at different points. The way I modeled most of the things here allowed me to do so easily – I start with a single polygon where I wanted to model the next part, I give it the Shell, symmetry and turbosmooth modifier, use "show end result" and start adding polygons to create the basic shape of the the armor part / cape part. As you can see,I get the base shape I want with only a few polygons, this allows easy tweakings all the way. One of the harder things for me is to decide when the shape of each part is final, at that point I use "override edge ID" to give the side polygons the gold material and after that I collapse the shell modifier so that I can edit the golden edges further. after I had all the armor parts on top of each other it was time to add the diamonds in. Basically, the steps are: preparing the topology (having one or two polygons in place to work with), extruding inwards, changing the ID to 2 (gold material), extruding outwards and extruding inwards again, changing the ID to 3 (diamond material) extruding outwards and tweaking.
When I decided I was done with the Modeling, I’ve decided to make a basic quick rig to help me pose him easily.
Something else I thought I’ de share here – Modeling the staff was really easy and fun once I figured it will be symmetrical to 4 sides, I simply added 2 symmetry modifiers and I actually modeled just a quarter of it while seeing the end result interactively.