Baba Yaga

The whole story of a chicken leg house starts with Baba Yaga. She cast a spell on a house, so he grew legs and can walk now. Creating Baba Yaga was somewhere on my wishlist for this project. She can fly around a house on a broomstick while he walks. She is a devil creation and has all sorts of dark powers, so to make her more sinister and out of this world, I gave her horns and black eyes.
Since I nearly finished house animation and I have a time left, I can begin to sculpt a high poly version of Baba Yaga in ZBrush.
I started with the head. With the horns and pointy nose, I tried to incorporate some triangles to her design, so when the viewer sees her silhouette, he can notice that she is evil and dangerous.

I wanted her to look like a grumpy, old lady, but with features, that will give her more personality.
I didn't want to spend too much time sculpting this model since it will be tiny comparing to the house. I treat it as an additional thing which can add a little more to the project. I didn't want to create her body from scratch, mainly because I will not be rigging her, so I wanted to establish her pose straight away. I knew that I might struggle with proportions, so I used a human figure Biped in 3ds Max to create a pose. When the pose was established, I exported the model as obj. At this point, I was able to easily and quickly sculpt the body. I used a Move Topology brush to shorten the limbs, and I added more mass with the Clay brush.

Biped

 Baba Yaga body sculpting process

I was struggling to create her clothing in ZBrush since she is wearing a long, loose skirt. This geometry can't be extracted or base on her body, so I did a very rough, low poly for each part of clothing and took it to Zbrush for further sculpting. Details like ropes and belt were also created in Max.

skirt design process (low poly in Max)

Full body high poly

face close up

To create a low poly model, I manually retopologized only the body, since I want the model to deform slightly in certain places like legs, arm and neck. I also wanted to have a good topology on the face to achieve more details and a good normal map. However, for the rest of the model, I used ZRemesh in Zbrush because when I was testing different methods, this one gave me the best results and it was the most efficient. The biggest downwards of using ZRemesh is that this tool does not create clean loops, which are going around the model, so it needs a clean up later. But because of this, I was able to maintain a lot of clothing details, like clothing folds, whit a little use of polygons. Since clothing will be very, slightly deformed, I decided that I can have topology which is not perfect, but it does what it should.

face close up low poly

low poly body

clothing details on low poly

I think that the design of this character tells a lot about her personality. Bones and horns creates pointy, sharp edges. Most of the evil or bad characters in games have some sort of ugliness incorporated in their design, so Baba Yaga with a mean expression on her face fits perfectly into this concept. 

In terms of time management, I think that I spend a little too long creating her. Comparing to the house, she seems really small, so I will use a lot of details. However, I had a good time sculpting her, and I really want to push this design further, after assignments, to make her playable character.

To do list is finally clean!