Previously, I had sketched out some ideas for my potential hero asset. The ideas were related to Egypt and Khonsu, the God of the Moon as that was the theme we had chosen.
My previous designs were fairly good, however the issue I had with them was if I could even make them. They all had Khonsu’s face on them when I didn’t even know how to model a face in Maya. Therefore, I decided to shift my focus to Khonsu’s staff. Not only did the colour scheme of blue and gold appeal to me, but it was something I could model whilst putting a lot of detail into it.
As you can see, I made some modifications to it. I did this to make it more interesting and also fit with the altar room theme. As mentioned in a previous post, altar rooms usually have candles in them and so I made the staff hold a candle at the top.
The lore of this staff is that it is used to light all of the other candles in the altar room.
Our group had discussed the possibility of the altar room being cult-like, with sacrifices made to Khonsu. As a result, I experimented further with the hidden knife idea. This time, the hidden knife would be at the base of the staff. On the bottom of the staff, “Khonsu” is written in Egyptian hieroglyphs. This adds more lore to the hero object and could easily be done using substance painter.
The knife could be this something like this shape. The reference I used was of Tutankhamun’s knife. When modelling, I would have to make sure that the base of the knife is the same size as the base of the staff, as the knife is meant to be able to slide into the staff seamlessly.
Overall, I am very happy with the idea for my hero asset as it fits the theme of an Egyptian altar room very well. Refining my ideas down to just a single one has helped me to focus on what to do next in terms of modelling. Now I can begin to model the high poly version in Maya.