MrGreene
Well-Known Member
With the upcoming re-release of one of my favorite games ever made, I decided now would be a great time to start one of my 'holy grail' projects: Majora's Mask.
No Zelda game has ever affected me quite the same way as Majora's Mask, most notably because of its extremely dark and serious atmosphere.
To those who've played the game, the mask itself evokes a sense of dread and unsettling creepiness, but let's be honest, the official game art doesn't quite do that creepiness justice. It just looks a little too clean and happy:
I wanted to capture the sense of dark and gritty terror that the mask is supposed to evoke, and while there is lots of non-official art that accomplishes this, there's one design that captures it perfectly - the cover art for Theophany's Time's End reorchestration soundtrack (which is absolutely stunning, by the way):
So, after figuring out some dimensions and compensating for the perspective shift in the image, I started CAD modeling the base features. A few hours' worth of lofts, cuts, sweeps, and curse words, I ended up with a pretty good base shape:
(That reference geometry, though)
With that done, I imported the model into Zbrush for some ultra-high-poly tweaks and hand-sculpted details.
I really wish I could have recorded a sculpt timelapse, but the learning curve for this software is damn near vertical, so I didn't have time to document much of it.
Suffice to say, the model is about 90% complete, with a couple of the spikes finished and ready for prototyping.
Some detail shots:
I really liked the idea of the eyes being focused around natural knots in the wood, as though they were the reason the original form.
(Fun fact: the only backstory for the mask was given in a manga adaptation, where it was carved out of the shell and bones of a giant beast, but that's a whole non-canon issue I won't even get into!)
That's it so far. There's still a bit of texturizing to do on the body of the mask, but it's coming along super fast. I hope to start prototyping the parts tomorrow and finish a test assembly this weekend.
No Zelda game has ever affected me quite the same way as Majora's Mask, most notably because of its extremely dark and serious atmosphere.
To those who've played the game, the mask itself evokes a sense of dread and unsettling creepiness, but let's be honest, the official game art doesn't quite do that creepiness justice. It just looks a little too clean and happy:
I wanted to capture the sense of dark and gritty terror that the mask is supposed to evoke, and while there is lots of non-official art that accomplishes this, there's one design that captures it perfectly - the cover art for Theophany's Time's End reorchestration soundtrack (which is absolutely stunning, by the way):
So, after figuring out some dimensions and compensating for the perspective shift in the image, I started CAD modeling the base features. A few hours' worth of lofts, cuts, sweeps, and curse words, I ended up with a pretty good base shape:
(That reference geometry, though)
With that done, I imported the model into Zbrush for some ultra-high-poly tweaks and hand-sculpted details.
I really wish I could have recorded a sculpt timelapse, but the learning curve for this software is damn near vertical, so I didn't have time to document much of it.
Suffice to say, the model is about 90% complete, with a couple of the spikes finished and ready for prototyping.
Some detail shots:
I really liked the idea of the eyes being focused around natural knots in the wood, as though they were the reason the original form.
(Fun fact: the only backstory for the mask was given in a manga adaptation, where it was carved out of the shell and bones of a giant beast, but that's a whole non-canon issue I won't even get into!)
That's it so far. There's still a bit of texturizing to do on the body of the mask, but it's coming along super fast. I hope to start prototyping the parts tomorrow and finish a test assembly this weekend.
