Mixing styles of two games and creating something new has always been a fun experience for me. I took the character from WOW and mixed it with Hades's art style to see how these two worlds would look like if they combined into one. The outcome of this couldn't make me happier of this piece.

I sculpted everything in ZBrush from the body to the weapons and accessories. The biggest challenge ever was the bow. It was remade 3 separate times before I got to a point where it fit the style of the character. I began this project with a very naive mindset, I thought everything was going to be basic shapes with some details on top, but I couldn't have been more wrong. The armor pieces on her legs took me a long while to get them to a point where they looked natural.

In Autodesk Maya I did the retopology and UV cutting. Because the character was symmetrical the process went smoothly while the bow proved to be a challenge yet again. One by one I had to retopologies each one of the bones on the spine that made the curve on the bow. This too the longest to do, I started to regret making most of the bones different from one another.

The textures were made in Adobe Substance Painter. I was aiming to achieve the Hades art style way of texturing, and because of this I only focused on the Base Color Map. I broke down the style in a way that made sense to me. I layered the shading with 3 colors, going from the lightest to darkest. The darkest at the end being a solid black. I added the black where there was most coverage on the model, and where the part would be seen way less or at all.

For the metal bits, I added a very sharp shape where the light source would be, and gave it a really bright color to emphasize the shine in that area.
The feathers and the cape are 3D meshes that have been baked on a plane. By doing this I still had all the maps needed to add generators to help me make the planes look 3D, saving me a lot of time on making the shadows and curves by hand.
The whole rig for Sylvana's was done with Autodesk Maya. I used Create3DCharacter's Hive Auto-rigger to help me speed up this process. Once you understand the basics of rigging and how they work, auto riggers always speed up your workflow by a lot!

I also created a custom rig for the Bow which I added on top of the Character Rig
One of the most important things I learned to prepare me for working in a studio, is working with references. Having the ability to work with one master scene, and most things still be editable is awesome. Also one of the best tools i came across is Studio Library Studio Library is an insane add-on for posing, animating and overall organization of your project. If you haven't checked it out yet, do it!