Neti, Female Sith

My very first SWAG art upload! Since this is a finished product and the sample renders I made along the way contain nudity, theres little point of making a blog entry. Instead, I'll just detail the creation process here.

This was a private request by Uron Teff. Normally I don't do requests due to the nature of availability of 3d models that I have, and the limited availability of what's out there, and yet what I have to buy in order to complete the project. That being said, Once I buy it,

Uron was looking for a picture of a Female Neti Jedi / Sith for a new character he was creating, and only had T'ra Saa @ Wookieepedia to go by. He talked to me about the character concept, and it inspired me to try to take on this unique challenge. At the time I was unsure if I'd be able to complete the task, but I was determined nonetheless.

One thing this character was going to offer me was a wide leeway of creative license. From the limited source of reference images, the species lacked a nose, but there was no telling whether or not they had ears. I figured I'd cross that bridge when I come to it. As it turned out, I managed to hunt down and buy some character morphs that'd allow me to make the basic humanoid appearance, with the modifications of removing the nose and ears. Finding what I could use for hair, or what the Neti had for hair was actually plant roots. Neti are a plant based species. This was probably the hardest aspect of the character creation, and I tried a bunch of different resources until I found something I could work with, pose and shape into tentacle like roots. I owe a thanks to KeithM from ShareCG for the free tentacles.

Next step was the skin and root textures. Slapping on a beige color wasn't going to suffice for my taste. I played around with Carrara's shaders, and the presets it had for trees and plants. A bit of fiddling and I came out with 2 satisfactory settings - White Elm bark, and Maple bark. The incredibly fine texturing and detail isn't very visible in this image, and I'll provide a closeup portrait.

After that, was facial and beauty aspects - the manicure, lip color, eye retina color - all very easy from the assortment of options I had. I went with a chocolate brown lip color, which I felt went nicely with both the roots and skin color blend. For some reason, maybe the lighting, it still looks a bit redish. The nails I did a deep red, for that feminine touch. Uron requested yellow eyes, but all I had was hazel. I also kept the eyelashes, but removed the eyebrows.

At this point, she was still nude with all to bare - chest, nipples, nether regions. I'm not about to theorize or debate why 90% of the humanoid and non-human female gender of races have mammary glands, and I probably could have flattened the chest but like I said, I wasn't going to bother going into that discussion. Besides, she looks like a she and thats good enough for me. But she still needed cloths and a backdrop, and a few accessories.

The backdrop... I originally had thought of some sort of castle or temple, the old stone & brick style, perhaps even something middle east. I had a few scene sets and bought another, but none of them really had what I was looking for. So I tried a few different sets, and settled on this one called Level19. Yeah, its a futuristic multipurpose setting, depending on what camera angle you used. Then I went for the lighting. The effect I wanted something was for dark, with a single lightsource to play across the scene - lots of shadow and dark with a single bright light. I wanted to portray the cool confidence feel of the character, and the coldness from the Sith. I still had to position the character just so in the scene. I'd fine tune it later.

For her clothing, at the start I had several ideas what I could do, and what I could use. Some of them were very traditional Sith-like, for the dark blacks, greys, and navies. As I kept working on her, I also continued to browse around for more ideas. I already owned some dresses and outfits, but something caught my eye - something very very unlikely that just might work even better than traditional Sith. According to Uron, she formerly was a Jedi, become Sith. That detail was the stepping stone I needed when I came across this particular dress. Rusty tomato with cream, gold, and light blue trimming & accents. Its part of an Egyptian theme set, and it was very affordable so I bought it! When I put the dress on her, I knew that was the one. It really set off and then complemented her beige skintones. And not just her either - with the backdrop and lighting I had selected, that dress really added this aura of warmth to the rather cool, cold metal room obscured by shadow. Such a stark contrast. Yes, this was like the whipped cream and cherry toping on that delicious hot fudge sundae on a hot summer's day. I then added arm and wrist bands of the same matching dress texture for added accent.

I have a variety of lightsaber model designs so I picked out one made by Kirisute. Uron's wish was for something that resembled a tree branch, but the way the model uvmapping & zoning was done on this saber hilt, it just wasn't possible, even though I had plenty of other tree based shaders to work with. The lightsaber blade was something else - I lost track of how long I fiddled with it, but in the end I still have alot to learn about the finer points of Carrara to make lightsaber blades with the electric glow & hue. I wasn't about to leave the blade looking like a semi-translucent red pole, so I hid the blade. The Sith Holocron was simple. I had come across this freebie made by Ellpro some time ago. Eventually I'll have to make my own, but the ready made freebie was good enough for now.

The very last was some much missing posture and facial expression to make her more alive rather than the lifeless default mannequin the Victoria3 model starts as. Once done... I decided to toy with adding something else to the scene - a droid companion of some sort. Well, to make a long story short, I tried various robots and droids of the legged and hover type, but each and every one of them only detracted from the feel and focus of the scene.

Materials & Setup:
Intel Core2Quad Q6600 cpu, 2gb ram, Carrara 6.0
Render time: 2048x1536 Original Image resolution, 25minutes @ best render quality.
Models: Victoria 3, sci-fi morphs, Nile Dress, Sith Holocron by Ellpro, lightsaber by Kirisute, tentacles by KeithM, Level 19 set by Stonemason
Adobe Photoshop Postwork: Signature added only

TNJadeonar

Thanks for the comments and warm welcome Travis!

I'll definitely be making more 3D renders, almost all SW based. That much you can count on (aside from the occasional 2d vector stuff). Its become one of my favourite hobbies and past-times ;)
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Core to the Quad baby!!!