Lokar: The Heretic Knight

Ah yes, good ol' Lokar, my most MOST hated character. He was supposed to be a "barbarian" in the Nordic sense of the word, so I gathered up a bunch of pictures of barbarians, took a good study of them and drew up some basic body templates to start modeling off of. Here's where things start getting weird - the concept drawings I did of him earlier showed him as more of large warrior donning layered samurai type armor. Where I got that from i have no idea, but it bore a resemblence to Shao Khan from Mortal Kombat. So even after having studied the reference barbarian pictures thoroughly, for some reason I when I modeled him, he came out looking like this. I guess part of my subconscious liked him better looking like as initially designed.

Another reason he's my most hated character - his armor went through 3 different textures. The first, as seen on the props at his feet, didn't fly so well as they didn't make much sense as far as the damage was concerned. The second texture had more detail as the texture map was twice the size, but it still looked a little to neutral, gray, metallic and dull. The third, I combined the detail of the second with the colour scheme of the first, and it seemed to work in my favor the most. He was also supposed to have a chainmail cape that was nclothed, but due to time constraints, those had to be left out.

And the hardest aspect of creating this character? Skin texturing. In fact I think it was during this stage in my workflow that I actually fell sick with the fever for an entire week. It's hard to find the right kind of skin texture combined with handpainting to get that real skin look. Now that I actually have knowledge about the SSS shader, I realize all that could have been avoided if only I knew about the shader then. However, it was definitely a great learning experience. At least now I know I can sort of handpaint skin textures, lol.

Because i worked so long and hard on this character (oh the UV's took for fucking ever because of his props), and the fact that he is my weakest character just because I didn't have him planned out properly from the start, is why i hate him the most. Everyone agrees he is my weakest character except for the HR ladies at school who advised me to put him first on my reel to show I'm capable of making a default character. I guess that's why they're HR specialists, not artists, cause all the artist I've spoken to agree that he's my weakest. One of them at EA even says I might want to consider removing him from my demo reel entirely, lol. whatever, he'll stay on for now until I create someone better to replace him with.

Hell, even the name Lokar are pulled from my ass after remembering one of the villains from Power Rangers i used to watch as a kid.