Statues WIP (Patreon)

If you're gonna make a Gorgon's Lair then it's gotta have some statues.

Instead of petrifying to stone I thought it would be a little more modern to go with marble.  I thought it would fit pretty well with the style and end up giving them more visual appeal instead of fading them into the background.  It also helps give the impression that they're being preserved instead of discarded.

Over the past few days I came up with a somewhat streamlined process of making these statues and porting them over to the environment.  I started with a few base characters I put together in Daz, with a selection of outfits and props, and ported them to Blender.  From there I could use some stock poses I found as reference and work from there.  Since the statues don't need to move, I don't have to be very careful with them.

I had originally planned to have hundreds in the cavern but quickly came to the conclusion that it would be a significant technical challenge and perhaps a poor artistic choice.  Though they don't totally fill out the environment like I'd hoped, focusing on ~20 statues, making them pop, and telling a story with each will probably pay off more in the long run.  Come to think of it; it just wouldn't make sense to have a village-worth of victims from a narrative perspective.

The environment is close to being ready, but there are still a lot of refinements I'd like to make.  There needs to be more tying the whole scene together, but I'm afraid of cluttering things up.  The poly count is already pretty high, and it's only going to get higher when I add the characters and principle props in.

I want to keep things somewhat grounded, as if the Gorgon is actually living in this space, but keep a mythic element to it.  This story is a bit more sympathetic towards the monster than most other depictions are, so I don't want to make things too menacing; more mysterious.  In the statues you'll see a mixed range of emotions to support this.  Hopefully this will help build tension to see how the Warrior's confrontation ends up.