Fairy Tales Challenge - Beauty and The Beast - 1940's Beauty

[Firefly]

Hello everyone! This is my first FlippedNormals challenge, and I am more than excited! My new year’s resolution was to improve my 3D art skills and been working really hard for it. I was looking for challenge like this. Sadly I noticed this pretty late… but let’s see how far I can get!

I decided to choose Beauty and The Beast as my fairy tale. I find the story to be really bizarre, and that’s why I think it’s perfect to reimagine, haha! It took a while to decide what to actually go for. I like to plan my character’s really carefully; think about the character’s traits and motives, and what kind of effect they have on character’s design.

The Beauty/Belle is usually described in the story adaptions to be really beautiful but kinda like a girl ahead of her time. The story is really old and it can be seen how the women are treated in the story. I actually watched the most recent movie adaption of the story for research, and felt pretty bad about it. Even though it was correct representation of those times the movie takes place to. So I decided that I want to bring the story modern day and picture modern day woman. But then I found another inspiration as well…

I have watched a lot of Marvel’s movies as well lately. Which have a lot of strong women and women ahead of their time. And I was greatly inspired by this, especially the character “Peggy Carter”. Pretty clear connection in the theme here. This is where I got inspiration to place my reimagination of the story in the year ~1940.

So my concept is that what kind of person and style would The Beauty have if the story would take place in 1940. Most certainly she wouldn’t just run to save her father with stick as her weapon and just stare from the distance in ball gown dress as two men fight for her love

Here to start of my workflow process diary. My early reference and moodboard collection:

Let’s start working! Good luck for everyone doing the challenge!

[Firefly]

I got my basic blocking done. I bought an anatomy book earlier this year and I was practicing a lot of male anatomy. And that is why this time I was set on doing female character because I wanted to focus on practicing female anatomy. So I took my time to sculpt the base. The body can be still improved but I tried to keep it quite toned down with the features. The body will be covered in clothes mostly anyways.

All the clothes were done by hand. I have Marvelous Designer next in my list to practice really hard. But to meet the deadline of this challenge I used my old method of creating clothes. I have different things in mind of what I want to learn from this project and focus on.

I have really strong vision of what kind of pose I want for the character. Which could really tell the story behind it. And as the character itself is kinda “basic” visually, I want to focus on that. I am wondering what kind of props I can create for the character in this challenge to meet the rules. I don’t think that the polycount will be the problem but I am more worried about the textures. Character can have two texture map sets, but are the props count on this? Let’s say I want to make a chair for the character, can it have it’s own textures and everything will still be fine? I guess? As they are only for the beauty shot anyways.

I am still going to make a really big changes in face and hair. Next I’m gonna block out some smaller objects, like straps in the shoes, belts and larger buttons etc. Also need to start thinking of her main props like roses, what kind to make exactly.