This is Rose Wilson, aka Ravager, the daughter of Deathstroke the Terminator and current member of the Teen Titans. I belatedly got into Geoff Johns'
Teen Titans series last year, and the character arc of poor, unbalanced, brainwashed Rose was one of my favourite things about it. When she rejoined the Titans after the whole silly One Year Later gimmick, she was damn near my favourite character in the book. Since she's also grossly underrepresented in the C2F/HM community, I decided to try my hand at manipping her.
I was initially planning to do a more dynamic, actiony pose, but I found I just couldn't work out anything either in preparatory sketches or by monkeying around in Daz that felt "right." So I went for a more static, but potentially moody "heading for battle" idea instead, partially inspired by the classic "Let's go to work" credits sequence in
Reservoir Dogs.
So I made a base image in Daz using Vicky 3 and got to manipping. Her mask, the non-armoured parts of her bodysuit, and most of her gauntlets and boots I made using my standard costuming techniques, ie. pick out a selection using the pen tool, desaturate, Dodge & Burn and smudge to make it look less like skin (or Poser skin, in this case), then recolour using Color Balance. All the seams are just paired black and white lines in separate layers set to either soft light or overlay, usually at 40-60% opacity. The wrinkles are mostly just D&Bed on copies of the original layers.
The belt and buckle, collar, lens over her good eye, armoured parts of her gauntlets, boot cuffs, swords and bits of fabric hanging from the back of her mask (whatever the hell they're called) were all dperceful style grey flats that I D&Bed to give shape and then recoloured. For the lens, I went over the middle part of it with an eraser set to a low opacity to make it slightly translucent. (Not that you can tell or anything.) I added reflections by taking a neon-lit street scene kindly provided me by Matrixblur, shrinking it down and distorting it (and also using the displacement tool) to fit the shapes of the objects in question, then setting it to overlay at various opacities.
The chin is technically that of Famke Janssen (cause hers was the first pic I found that was at the right camera angle), but it's so heavily D&Bed and smudged (to create the cheekbones and the smirk) that it might as well have been from scratch according to photo reference.
Then there was the bleeping scale armour. Or: the main reason this one took me so long. It wasn't hard per se, just time consuming and repetitive. I played around with various textures and then tried to do some clever things with paths to fake it, but in the end, I found the only way I could get something I was satisfied with was just to make the damn scalemail from scratch. Scale by scale by bleeping scale. And it turns out nothing turns you off of manipping faster than having to do the same thing a few dozen times over. Who knew? I laid out grids to work on to create something that somewhat conformed to her shape (cause I may be insane, but I'm not insane enough to do something like this and just trust to luck
), then went in with the liquify tool to match the shape more accurately. For the lighting of the scales, I just merged the layers and D&Bed them to match the lighting on the original base model. I also added little individual reflections to each scale, not that you can tell. For those I took the aforementioned street scene, shrunk it down hugely, used it to create a pattern, displaced and liquified that to match the shape of the scales, and set it to overlay.
The background... I downloaded a free copy of the 3D environment creation software Bryce 5 while I was in the finishing stages of the costuming and, after upgrading to version 5.5 to get software that could actually open and save files on Mac OS 10.4.7 without crashing (
), I got to work. The pose pretty much demanded that Ravager be walking out of a dark alley, so that's what I made. Everything except the window is from scratch using Bryce primitives (cos I somehow never seem to find free objects models of any specific objects I want to use in a scene
), with brick textures from the web. I plugged in my original Daz Vicky 3 base model and rendered no less than three versions of the scene. One was a small guide I used to relight the character to fit into the scene (her face should actually be more shadowed, but that looked like crap, so I decided to let my sense of aesthetics triumph over realism). The other two were larger versions of the scene with and without V3, which I took into Photoshop and merged to get a background with the appropriate shadows on the environment but without yer actual naked Poser girl. Not that there's anything wrong with naked Poser girls or anything.
While I was in Photoshop, I smudged the background a bit to de-CG it, then added some texture by judicious use of the noise and craquelure filters, various blurs, and various distorts. I also sharpened the contrast a bit to bring out the background lights more.
So I finished the pic on Thursday... and have since spent the last three days looking at it every once in a while and inevitably finding new things to fix and/or change.
) I even found myself making a few changes to the damn thing while in the process of typing up these art notes. Seriously! Hopefully actually submitting it will stop that...
I lost count of how many hours of work went into this, but you can comfortably guess "many." I hope it was worth it. Thanks to Blurry, Bio, Jr and Zac for their various critiques and suggestions. And thanks to the various people who saw the WIP and told me it was cool for giving me the impetus to keep working on it.
Hopefully the next one will come a bit faster...
! Manip !
DC Comics
2006/9/10 20:54
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15 
Re: Daddy's Girl
Re: Daddy's Girl
B that's great work,nice going!
