Indians - (W.I.P.)
I worked on Indians for a while. I had little experience in 3D at the time and in my ignorance I dreamed of creating an entire Indian world. I dreamed way too big! Along the way I got stuck, there were problems I didn't know how to solve yet, it took much longer than expected and after a while the project got stuck and I finally dropped it, ending up in other 3D experiments...
So it's not finished. I haven't buried it yet, it's still a work-in-progress (I hope)... Maybe one day I'll work on it again... who knows?
Here's an overview of my tinkering from that time...
This was my desktop wallpaper for a long time. To remind me to focus on my Indian project. It has been useful for some time...
Everything was modeled, step by step, with verts, edges and quad faces... Very slowly, I hadn't discovered sculpting yet :-)
I made an Indian head and an Indian body to serve as a basis for creating all kinds of Indian stuff.
I made 3 basic "hairstyles": a Mohawk, an Apache and a Sioux hairstyle. That created some diversity.
I also modeled "moccasins", for now only one kind, but later I wanted to make several...for example "boots" for the Apaches.
I modeled a "loincloth"..."buckskin leggings"...a "war shirt"... And "eagle feathers" of course...
...and I made bear claws! I made several "necklaces" with that... Some with 3 bear claws, others with 12 ...
...one even with 31 bear claws. It fits especially well with a Mohawk in my opinion... But the Apache also looks good with it, I think...
Here I made a "breastplate"...it took me a lot of work to get all those bones and feathers in the right place...
...but I really liked the end result. He also wears a matching "necklace" here.
I tried several combinations of all those things...
I also modeled a "beaded knife sheath", an authentic Sioux model... (but the Mohawk also wears it here).
I also tried to make "beaded shoulder straps". No color patterns for now, just trying to render the correct scale here...
And I tried out real feathers. I found my modeled feathers too stiff, I wanted the feathers softer, looser, fluffier...
All of these here are based on only 1 photo. As a first test of course...
I also tried to make good-looking "braided Indian hair". My first attempts were way too detailed, my old laptop kept crashing!
Here I have already decimated the number of verts. And even now I still have 138,342. Not really usable for animation! :-/