Salvation Army Lass - Part 5

January 29, 2014

Latest Post Video Game Sculpts by Will Soule

The triumphant return of the Salvation Army Lass series!   A quick recap since it has been a while since I wrote about (or worked on) this project.   The concept is simple, a Salvation Army girl from the World War I era who is fighting for our souls by battling nefarious demon-esque creatures!Here was my strange yet oddly appealing concept painting based on an initial pose, the genesis of which can be seen in greater detail in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series:

Too much Starship Troopers, too much...

Originally the creature was thrown in as a joke, but I liked it so much I decided to sculpt a creature for the piece!   However, the X-men Beast with a Lord of the Rings-esque dwarf helmet got the axe (pun intended?) in lieu of a smaller less-armored demon.  Next, came some pose tweaking, outlined in Part 3, which yielded something exactly like this:

That nude bald chick just totally murdered that demon!

Now onto new stuff!  With my desired pose in place, I crafted the clothing base geometry using a combo of Maya and ZBrush.  I did this first on a non-posed version of the model which made it easier to build up this geometry using symmetry:

Technicolor version is the clothing polygroups, typically I split groups at seams to make posing & UVing easier

An interesting note on the Salvation Army clothing.  I modeled the buttons to contain a Salvation Army logo I found via the internet as shown below, but check out the old motto, "Blood and Fire".  Maybe I wasn't so far off with the whole Salvation Army fighting demons thing after all?

"Blood and Fire" sounds a lot like demon slaying to me... just saying...

Ok, after the clothing was roughed in I began moving the geometry around my posed model.  This is the same pose as the nude version above just spun at a different angle and with a slightly less pissed off face.  Also, the gun and knife are replaced with more detailed versions outlined in Part 4 of this series.  Cigarette added in for early 20th century goodness.

Wait, why wouldn't the knife be dripping demon blood?

My "Wings?" comment got me to thinking about her demon prey a bit more, so I sketched a few demons to get a better feel for how that guy would look.

Some kinda toad bat demon with Shrek ears, the worst kind...

And as I was all demon inspired I went ahead and sculpted a better companion, or at least better prey, for the Salvation Army lass:

The toad bat demon would like to make an appointment to swallow your soul

That's about all I have time for now, the actual lass sculpture should be complete for my next post and hopefully I'll have a render with the two figures together!  Stay on target...

Owen Soule

Published January 29, 2014