Continuing with the wuxia theme of my previous project, I wanted to delve a bit more into the same world of robed figures and water and landscapes. This time, I wanted to go for a more muted, calligraphy-like tone. To do this, rather than rely on compositing, I lowered the saturation of the sun lamp and HDRI from the start and altered the hues of some materials.
For the characters, I used the same free base model from Reallusion that I use for all my projects. This time, after looking at Youtube tutorials for sewing cloth, I measured out the rough dimensions of the body so that the final clothes would be better sized. The belt of the character is made with a curve deform mesh. I also designed the insignia on the character’s sword and hat with Procreate - it’s meant to be a crane/ bird of some sort. Finally, I based the mask on Japanese samurai masks - rather than copying any one directly, I tried to design my own. It looked very clownish at first but I realised the trick to make it look fierce was to accentuate the angle of the brow.
For the water, I used similar techniques from the previous project with foam and the ocean modifier. However, I also used a geometry proximity node to drive displacement around the boats. In order to create a boat wake, I used a spline object with the geometry proximity node that I hid afterwards (I considered using dynamic paint but figured that it would wreck Blender on my laptop).
The rocky cliffs are Megascans assets, and the background is a photograph I took at Lake Onneto, Japan. I’ve been wanting to use this photograph for a project and the moody vibes of this project were indeed inspired by it.
Hope you enjoy!
