Gena and Drex - Personal character remakes, NPR

Current State

(Please click for a clearer view)


I had a bit of a story when I first modelled Gena that she got her “wings” by putting on a bracelet that then couldn’t be removed. I’ve since extended the idea further, and the bracelet entwines itself with the torso (with the wings growing from the shoulder blades) with the strands extending up to the face. The story now involves Drex’s species as a part of the melding, hence the bracelet’s colours being similar to Drex’s.

The “wings” are extensions of the bracelet strands that are made possible by using Drex’s “essence”. The civilisation that created the bracelets intended them to be usable as weapons in combat, so the wings need to be maneuverable. The first set of wings a person gets (one bracelet) extend from around the shoulder blades, and the second set (with two bracelets) extend from the tailbone.

Drex became Gena’s companion when she found him in the forest at a young age after his parents had been killed by humans. The image below was me exploring the differences in anatomy between a very young Drex and one of his parents.


Original Post

Long time reader, first time poster!

Back when I was at uni I used 3ds Max (that’s what we were taught), but I started using Blender in 2012 when I was nearing the end of my degree. Since then I’ve almost exclusively used Blender for my projects - and I decided I’d have a go at remaking two characters that I originally created in Max.

I wanted to remake the characters with more interesting traits - I crossed Drex’s dinosaur body with that of a bat and I remodelled Gena to have a much more curvy figure.
So far I’m having a lot of fun with this and I’m hoping to take the characters to a point where I can do a proper render of them!

Original (2012, 3ds Max):



Wireframes:



I’ve been modelling these characters with subdivision in mind. There’s just a few tris left to iron out if I wanted to have a go at sculpting in Blender.

Comments welcome :slight_smile:

Very cool, looks like its coming together well…the new shapes are a huge change for the better.

The breast are perhaps a touch low? with her arms to the sides they could they be a bit firmer and just a touch higher? just a thought. That was the only thing that stood out to my artist eye.

One further thought, since she’s got that great hour glass figure you might try to bring it out even more…perhaps just a tad thinner in the waist? hard to say since you’ve got a style that already looks cool but might be worth a quick try. You could play with the head size too, smaller might be very cool… perhaps smaller shoulders…just to see what happens…those are just things I try out as I work to complete a design.

keep posting, I really want to see you finish this. Great detail so far and looks to be a very clean mesh.

Thanks for the response!
I lifted her breasts a little and will take another look at it when she has clothes on, as that should help determine how much support they’ll have. Her head size will probably change when I start putting hair on her head, as it could look too large then.

I spent some time working on her hands; ironing out tris there proved to be a little tricky while trying to keep a reasonable edge flow.


I’ve also been looking at the face topology of the characters. Drex was a bit difficult as its harder to find reference to animal topology, especially for faces that will animate. I might change Gena’s face topology a little as I’m not sure I’m happy with it yet.


The next thing is hair for both of them. Drex has long hair/fur running down his back, and I’m not sure if I should do hair planes or try something more realistic!

Looking good.

your thumb will give you trouble with that layout…its off. I did the same thing and had to change mine. :slight_smile:

Hey, I’m not quite sure what you mean (topology, position, shape)? I would definitely like to have the models work well when I rig them up to animate.

thumb position … :slight_smile:

Thanks :slight_smile:

Drex is unwrapped and has a base texture applied! Time to move on to Gena while I consider the hair/fur possibilities.


Things have been moving a little slower this week as I’ve been sick :frowning:

I’ve been working on Gena’s clothing but for today decided to edit her face topology to improve the edge flow and have cleaned up all but 1 tri as she’s designed to be subdivided.


This looks really good. So I was wondering, how are you going about with the modeling process. I mean, are you using box modeling, edge-to-edge? Still, looks really good. And I just want to mention, your original kind of looks like something out of the earlier Zelda games (N64 and Gamecube versions). Keep up the good work, I’m looking forward to seeing more!

Heya, thanks :slight_smile:

Drex was all box modelling to get the form right, then going back and cutting loops where needed as finding topology references was difficult. Gena’s body was box modelled and loops created as I went as I had a bit more of an idea what I was doing (and had a ton of human topology reference). Her face was created using edge extrusion, which got all the basic loops in place. Updating the head topology from there was just rearranging/removing verts to clean things up a bit.

Glad you picked the Zelda inspiration, I’m quite a fan of the franchise :smiley:

Gena is unwrapped and has basic clothing on now! There are a few parts that aren’t meant to be mirrored (the bracelet strands and the top) and will fix them up once I get through unwrapping.


I had a bit of a story when I first modelled Gena that she got her “wings” by putting on a bracelet that then couldn’t be removed. I’ve since extended the idea further, and the bracelet entwines itself with the torso (with the wings growing from the base of the spine) with the strands extending up to the face. The story now involves Drex’s kind as a part of the melding, hence the bracelet’s colours being similar to Drex’s.

Long time no post! Between being unable to be at my computer and then having to catch up on work I haven’t had much time for this.

Gena’s clothing is unwrapped, unwanted symmetry removed and has a basic texture. I’ve also gotten around to modelling her wings, quite different to how the original’s looked. I want Gena and Drex’s features to be closely tied to one another.


I suppose now it’s time to tackle the hair I’ve been avoiding!

Playing with fur! I’m still not sure which way I want to go with the hair on both characters - particle or mesh hair.

I started this project wanting to try different things to what I did in the original, but I’d like to keep some ties to my inspiration, Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword.

If anyone has any thoughts on doing hair in non photo-realistic situations, please let me know :slight_smile:


You may be able to render the particle hair on one layer and the other bits on another. Then combine them. I have not tried it but have read others mention this kind of thing.

Hey, thanks for the suggestion, I ended up coming to that point too. The hair is on its own render layer now, so I was able to exclude it from the main line technique and then combine it with a second outline that worked better with it.

I also played further with trying to give it a more hand drawn/painted feel. The extra meshes in the distance are to test how the depth based effects are working.

I’ve started skinning Gena and Drex to see how the hair behaves with movement. I’ve looked around a bit but a lot of the hair tutorials I’ve found deal with meshes in a single pose, not multiple poses or in an animation. I’ve only found a little on hair collisions and not much at all the workflow for styling hair for an animation. I had a play with curve guides but they don’t appear to work well with a full head (or body length) of hair. So much to learn!


This is great , I love it , its simple and awesome , but I have a slight problem that is bugging me , really bugging me , from an artist eye point of view , to test it I even closed the thread and reopened it few times looking at the pic , if you try it you will notice the only thing you see is her wings and you miss everything else , I think its killing your hard awesome work .

Thanks! :slight_smile: Gena’s wings are quite striking in that pose at the moment, but when I’ve finished skinning hopefully I can find some better poses for them. Composition wise I’m a long way from done as I was hoping to model an environment for them to be in… But maybe that’s being a little ambitious at this point :eek:

Gena and Drex have been rigged and skinned (mostly). For the most part Gena’s clothing works without too many intersections with her body. The hair follows them once cached but I’m still not sure how to go about styling!

I’m having issues with the bracelet strands that wrap around her as they don’t follow the same loops or have the same vertex positions as her body, and unfortunately the Shrink Wrap modifier doesn’t appear to update the current frame based on the previous one. I’ve tried weight transfers from the body to the strand mesh but there’s a lot of intersections, so for now it’s hidden - if anyone has any ideas on how to go about keeping it on the outside of her mesh, please let me know :slight_smile:


Something about her wings bothers me a bit. In the rest position they are still too high. They need to bend at the “elbow” joint and “shoulder” more like Drex. This would bring the wing down further in its rest position. Also if the skin of the wing attached to her back below the base of the wing where her shoulder blades are it would give a more complete looking wing.

Overall I really like your concept. Great work.

I agree those wings are bothering me too , I really think Drex should have the small wings and she should have a slightly longer ones , and that joint needs to be centered on that long bone and like you said put them behind her . extruding a leather strapping on her shoulders and chest dose not take much and it will add to the character mb those joints do not need to be bones .