Tag Archives: 3D character art

An early render of Lord Cafrash Menchtoteale

Since we’ve been looking at a lot of my early Daz renders, let’s now take a look at the renders I have of Lord Cafrash Menchtoteale, one of my characters from the Wishing Blade series. (He starts as an antagonist… then kind of ends up in as the questionable mentor… whether he wants to be a mentor or not).

So a long, long time ago when I was playing around with Daz, I rendered Cafrash, the creator of the Wishing Blade (the series’ namesake). I rendered this image a couple times, since I apparently designed it on my older laptop, whose graphics card that would have made rendering nice went caput before I found Daz. Then I rendered it again once I got my then-new laptop (which now mostly lays in rest because I used it a lot for rendering and that’s… very intensive on a laptop, unfortunately. Renders now happen on a desktop with much better fans and airflow.

That first render took 7 hours, and didn’t have nearly as good as the results of this 2-hour render.

Needless to say, I was quite happy with the capabilities of the then-new laptop. (And I suspect the new desktop would render this much faster… though we’re on a new version of Daz now so the lighting system would probably have to be readjusted).

Anyway, enough about laptop capabilities. Lord Menchtoteale was a blacksmith before getting involved with the trickster god. Long story short, he forges the Wishing Blade, the weapon used to steal magic from Cirena in Magic’s Stealing.

Here’s a render that Isaac put together from a later version of Cafrash’s character design, which I then polished:

A blacksmith hammers a sword with magical blue wisps above it.

But did Cafrash actually want to forge the sword?

Is he really the warlord everyone thinks he is?

Or is there more going on behind the Trickster’s plans than meets the eye?

Cafrash’s backstory is one part of the story I’m having a lot of fun working with, and first started showing up in The Shadow War, and has a much larger role in Magebane.

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Meet Lord Menchtoteale in all his grumpy “I’m going to give you advice whether either of us want to deal with this,” in The Wishing Blade series…

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Happy reading and writing!

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An early render of Siklana

At some point in 2019, I took to learning how to use Daz Studio in my spare time. Daz is a 3D modeling program that lets you purchase assets (poses, characters, clothing, backgrounds, etc) for your own use and then position those assets to create scenes.

There is also the ability to “morph” the basic models so they match how you envision your own characters.

The first character I customized was Siklana Covonilayno, Toranih’s sister from The Wishing Blade series:

A young noblewoman with long brown hair  in a navy blue dress and overcoat.

Her hair’s a bit too long here, but this was a quick render to test the outfit and general background.

Here’s a closer look at her facial structure (customized from the Victoria 4 base model — which I’m still impressed I succeeded with since shortly after, I started working primarily with Genesis 8 models).

(At some point I needed a Daz PA (Published Artist) profile image, and this was one of my early renders I was happy with, so I used that. Later on I realized that she looks a little like me when the image is in tiny thumbnail size. Not intentional.)

At some point I might make some adjustments to Siklana’s design, mostly in redoing the character on a later model to take into account some issues and limitations I didn’t know about when first starting.

I continued to work with learning the program, and eventually put together a full scene with her.

In this case, she’s with her horse, Esara.

A young woman standing on a vine-tangled staircase offers her hand to a curious horse at the foot of the stair.

(The horse’s coat and mane ended up a bit darker than I was initially picturing for Esara, so I may need to do some tweaking if I do further images with her).

The idea behind this image, though only mentioned in The Wishing Blade series rather than actually seen, is that Siklana used to go outside of Cirena City to practice her knife-throwing skills in peace.

She would ride out to the forested region behind the city walls to a small, abandoned ruin. (This region was once Aneth, home to those who would eventually spread throughout Cirena. At the time, they faced attacks by the immortals, and many of their buildings ended up in ruin once they fled). This particular building would likely have been fairly recent in their history, though still abandoned. But now this side of the forest is relatively safe. The perfect place to go when someone wants time to themselves to study and throw knives.

Are there any characters from the Wishing Blade universe (any of the stories) that you would be interested in seeing?

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Though Siklana starts as a side character, by Magebane she has a major character arc…

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Happy reading and writing!

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