In yet another segment included in today’s lengthy update to the Shroud of the Avatar Kickstarter page, Portalarium 3D artist Isaac Oster talks about the process of creating the female Avatar model for the game, showcasing his work with plenty of images taken at different stages of the process.

Rather than relying on concept artist Stephen Daniele for a reference image, Oster took it on himself (tough job, this) to find (ahem) reference material online and scuplt a basic 3D model in Zbrush:

And lest you fret, good readers, that this means there won’t be the option to customize your Avatar’s appearance in Shroud of the Avatar, here’s technical director Chris Spears addressing that concern:

As for the tech behind different sizes, the easy solutions are to do uniform scale on the character for tall/short etc. That works fine. To make players stouter the easy way is to scale only in 2 dimensions to make them thicker. This never really works though. The real longer term plan is that we will likely be using morph targets. Using those we give a thin version and a thick version and interpolate between them. So the above model would probably be 95% of the way to thin and 5% fat.

Back to the good Mr. Oster’s progress! The next step was to rough in a bikini and some hair to get a basic idea of the Avatar’s appearance:

The model then gets “baked” and normal mapped before being broken up into pieces for texture assignment:

The model is then textured, rendered, and imported into the game for some test scenes:

Of course, no Avatar should venture into the wilds of New Britannia unprepared, so the next step was to create and texture a set of armor for her, based off of some concept art for the male Avatar’s armor supplied by Stephen Daniele. This resulted, ultimately, in the creation of a goodly number of smaller 3D objects, which can be seen in an exploded view below. Comparitively, creating the actual base Avatar model must have been a breeze:

And here’s the near-final version of the model as she appears in-game:

And if you’re curious about the techniques that the good Mr. Oster used to texture the armour, don’t miss the most recent Pen of the Avatar video!