Art Corner - Death's Hand Character Concept
By Rion Swanson, Artist, Jade Empire
For the Death's Hand character, I started out by looking at images of armored characters from various books and movies. This got the ideas flowing and gave me a general feel for different armor types and costume elements that could be referenced to create a new costume for the character.
Death's Hand is dark, tough, mysterious, aggressive, and direct. These were some of the design ideas relayed by the writers and designers that had to be kept in mind while beginning to generate ideas and put them down on paper. Movies and books based on stories of the Three Kingdoms and Outlaws of the Marsh worked as inspiration and helped in getting a rough direction established. A major source of interest came from figurative sculptures of Asian celestial pantheons. The many gods and demons in their stylized sculptural form provided great inspiration for costumes. Also, various Tibetan and Japanese masks and Samurai attire were referenced.
Concepts started out with Death's Hand looking like a powerful general. Then they changed to give him a more fearsome appearance with the addition of demonic faces over his armor. A mask and full helmet were added, which started to lend him a darker, more mysterious feel. After some initial quick sketches, three full body sketches were done. At this point, a concept variation and high poly model were done by another artist that was modified to work better with animation. This version was then used in the first introductory Jade Empire cinematic. We gave the character another look at that point and decided to push it more, taking it in a slightly different direction.
About 30 rough sketches exploring chest armor and helmet and mask designs were done, which lead to a final direction. Another artist worked on a special variation of this more finalized version to further explore the depth of this character. From these, a couple more full body drawings were done and were changed where needed to accommodate technical limitations (issues related to cloth, pivot points, and movement) that lead to the final line drawing. This drawing was then done up as a color comp in Photoshop to provide a better sense and feel of form and, of course, color and mood.
Darker tones of navy blue were used together with saturated reds and gold to balance out the contrast and allude to the character's importance. This also allowed his dominant dark tones to maintain some color instead of becoming a black void, with the red and gold helping to create interest, especially when he moves around showering you with a frenzy of fists and kicks. The color version was done fairly quickly over an evening and afternoon, but it seemed to really help others on the project visualize him, so it was left in its comprehensive stage. After this, Death's Hand was modeled up, textured, and brought to his current state.
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