Saturday, January 21, 2012

Naso Turco

I've set a goal for myself to make as many masks as I can before Mardi Gras. It's a chance for me to really get more comfortable with mesh and to expand my collection of classic Venetian masks.

The first one that's been completed is one of the most instantly recognizable:



The Naso Turco is a traditional mask from Commedia Dell'Arte. There are a few different types of Naso masks (meaning "nose"), but this is one of the most iconic and popular. The Turco in the name might refer to the noble family of Verona, or perhaps to Cesare Turco, a renaissance artist. The Naso Turco has a very distinctive arching curve to the nose, as opposed to others which are perhaps shorter or more crooked.

I made a mistake in planning with this mask. I had a bit too much fun with drawing details directly onto the model and didn't think that I might want those aforementioned details to be a different color. I was playing around with it just being a solid color at first, but ended up preferring how it looked with contrasting trim.

(Still looks awesome though)

So, rather than my usual 3D trim, I decided to try an alpha overlay with this one. I think you can see in the vendor picture that it hardly suffers for it.

I went a little crazy with color options, which is another reason I had to resort to an alpha overlay for the trim. There are over thirty color options, including my usual 12 solid colors, and half and half "bicolors" of those in different combinations. They come paired with black, white, and a selection of twelve additional pairings I quite liked (such as purple and green for Mardi Gras!).

This mask is a mere 400 vertices! If you think of how sculpts are 1024 points each, it's just amazing how much detail can come out of having every point placed where it will do the most good.

I still have no affinity or skill for rigged meshes, so this is once again unweighted and freely modifiable. I certainly am getting the hang of it though and so far am just loving the freedom.

Expect more soon!


Out now at the store: 275L
Buy it on the Marketplace

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