Celtic Armour Added! Dont want to bombard it with too many details but iIwill scruff it up to match the quality of the shin pads and arm greaves. As the should pad I would like to be a light leather armour. 

Full body view as all parts can be seen. Im very happy with the results. I found some old Celtic patterns and fixed them up to  be able to be stamped into the armour using the mask alpha tool. (imported as PSD.) and then inflate the masked area to engraved the pattern.  

Nearly done and I am very happy with my results so far. I find really studying anatomy closely will get you that one step further to looking believable, not extremely realistic. just believable. Keep you're shapes simple and don't go off in tangents, Just focus on each goal. I now need to figure out his true personality through his face and hair!

Material Paint over - Photoshop

Armour Update! 

Here is the shoulder pad design. I decided to keep it a light leather type material as it would be quite painful running through the forest hunting for beasts with clunky armour! My idea is to add the Celtic knots and patterns within his armour and add scratches to suggest close calls with big cats.

Here I've added fluff in the ends of the armour to keep him warm on cold days and a tooth neckless to highlight his "wildness". 

Proportions + Armour  Update! 

Before Change

After Change 

This past week I have been working on my Celts main shapes, armour and proportions. I felt like his previous build was far too under defined for the characters archetype. Bulking his muscles up matches the more aggressive and brutish warrior that Celts once were. I decided to give him the bodybuilder Arnold/Cohan type body with a massive upper torso. This new adjustment made a massive difference and shows how powerful he is.

My next step was to shift my focus onto his armour and come up with a design mixed from my previous concepts. I started by basic box modeling armour pieces around the low res character in 3ds Max, positioning and roughly shaping the Armour. I didn't worry to much how it looked at this stage as I would throw everything into Zbrush to continue shaping. I believe most of the characters story would be captured in the armour from patterns, details and scratches. I found an image of a golden buckle shaped as a tiger/cat that looked very interesting. I thought this would be a good idea to implement as it could show he is a wild hunter!  

Same again, for the arm greaves. Modeled in 3ds-Max and brought in ready for sculpting and adjustment. I am really enjoying creating this character and love his design so far!

Early concept of the boots. 

Looking into Celtic culture is a very interesting topic to look at. There are many different types of Celtic culture. These include Ancient Celtic Culture, Celtic revival and Gaelic culture. Celtic art is a difficult term to define, covering huge expanse of time, geography and cultures. The main area of Celtic history I would like to base my characters designs on would be the culture of the European Iron age around 1000 BC. Celtic Knots are patterns representing ropes or threads tied in a knot. Many Knots are continuous, with no loose ends, and these are also called gordian knots or Gordic knots. Spirals, step patterns, and key patterns are dominant motifs in Celtic art before the christian influence on the Celts. I would like to replicate these patterns on my Celt to give him story, personality and character.

Drawings!

Im not the best at drawing, but I had fun creating these character concepts!

Massive brute torso with huge shoulder pads. 

Ranger type warrior with sword and bow.

Shoulder Pad designs

Large brute face with a Celtic type crown 

Kahl drogo type design 

Design! 

Once I was at this happy stage with his propotions, I took a quick render of the figure and took him into photoshop for paintovers. I decided to design basic armour outfits to try and find some sort of direction. I really the style of the first design from concept #1 as I like the wild leather with steel look, that i feel follows the Celtic style. #2 I find too basic (cliche?), although I really like his circular shapes such as the chest buckle.       

On the left- The classic wild barbarian look. On the Right - A more civilized warrior 

I really like the john snow type outfit in concept #2. A brute of a barbarian needs feathers and cloth to keep himself warm in the winter if he is only wearing skimpy armour! I went crazy with the hellish "Hades" (greek mythology, god of war) type character. maybe having 1 or 2 spikes on his armour won't hurt! :D  

On the left - The john snow look On the Right - An evil hell raiser!!

   I shall post up more reference images to bring myself closer to the traditional Celtic culture designs for armour details, shapes and traditions.  

3D/2D Concepts 

When designing my characters I find it easier to paint on a 3d base to visualize the concept clearer. The big challenge for me these past few weeks has been trying to accurately create a robust 3d muscular male to start designing from. In Zbrush I started with a basic sphere and started to pull out the shape of a human chest. By pushing and pulling out the forms of the muscles, using plenty of reference along side sculpting. Zbrushes dynamesh feature really allowed me to pull out the limbs with ease without any topological issues because of its amazing algorithm. From there I spent a long time refining each and individual muscle. He turned out to be a very muscular fella but I don't mind that he has a slightly exaggerated structure as it fits his brutish profile. Here is the progress during the entire sculpting progress. (Click the images for a better view!)         

Initial blockout

Added more dynamesh resolution and refined more muscle/

Very happy how this was going at this point. Although the arms looked strangely long!

I believe this point was my breakthrough once I properly punched out the chest. 

  

Here is where I finally decided to stop and turn back to the designing stage. Otherwise It would of never stopped! Ignore the dinky little arms for now! xD Now its time to start thinking about him as reckless brute...