Xiang Lishi IV

Xiang Lishi is a character from my personal project, Eternal Mandate, which tells the story of a futuristic imperial China and its return to its traditional cultural values, while still embracing the freedoms of contemporary society.

​

Initially, with the premise of the world down I had struggles with creating a character that fit the aforementioned world. Xiang's character design went through varying phases, but eventually I settled on blending her assassin occupation with the ethnic futurism of the world around her.

​

Her design was streamlined by incorporating a number of traditional elements into her design, such as the Hung Gar bracer on her left arm and the panchang knot she has repurposed as a necklace. Paired with the boots and the skirt, which in itself was inspired by the post-colonial era cheongsam, I was able to create a character design which, although familiar, nonetheless exudes a certain air of foreignity to push the alternate history narrative.

​

Actually creating the character mesh was very difficult, a feat that would ultimately take four tries - the first two being attempts at body sculpts, and the third and fourth moving on towards retopology and finally, rigging.

​

This particular iteration was sculpted and retopologized in Blender, before transitioning over into Maya for proper rigging and weight painting with the UVs being created in Photoshop.

​

There were a multitude of struggles with this project, especially with creating and properly weight painting the clothing, but through the work and effort, this ultimately amounted to a large amount of learning.