A review to the artistic creation process of Mounted Heroes Elf Warrior

By now, on Imagine 3D Miniatures webpage and on the Kickstarter that we launched a few months ago, we have shown you the two races that we designed to the moment: humans and orcs. However, Mounted Heroes online store will be opening on Fall 2015 with a new race: elves.

As the rest of our miniatures, elves will also be fully customizable and 3D printed. The only difference from the others is that we have changed the gender and for now the elves are the first female race of Mounted Heroes – which doesn’t mean that in time we won’t be making male and female genders for other races.

The first part of the elf creation process meant a first difference from the beginning because of the female body shapes plus the characteristic lightness of this race. In terms of creation, for our miniatures, the elf should be designed on proportion to the human and the orc size, smaller and less wide than its predecessors.

When we had already set the body dimensions of the elf, the next step was to start designing the different options for customization: weapons, armors, boots,… with a new feature added that we hadn’t developed to the moment, the hair, for which we designed different characteristic hairstyles.

In the category of weapons and armors the work of documentation and looking for references was larger and thanks to it we have been able to design completely new objects that follow the traditional aesthetic but reinterpreting and transforming it, many times inspired by the own Antique history, as happens in the case of some helmets. Among the weapons you can find plenty of options, from bows to swords, daggers, axes and also shields.

The result is a strong character of which we feel very proud. And though elves aren’t yet available on our miniature creator, we hope to keep working on our catalog and our customization options and that in a couple of months when we open the online store you enjoy our products.

Transforming artwork into 3D objects

We have talked about the creation process and designing of Mounted Heroes third race, the elf warrior. The same as happened when creating humans and orcs, the immediate work after the artistic process was the 3D modeling of the miniature, where it is important to keep in mind the size and proportion of the figure – especially when we’re talking about 3D printing.

On one hand, for the 3D modeling of the elf warrior we must first work on the proportion, which should be relative to the dimensions of humans and orcs. The size of the miniature should be the same in order to be available in our different 3D printing scales and their respective bases size. On the other hand, the elf should be thinner as a characteristic of the race and also have female proportions – the elf is Mounted Heroes first female race.

It is also important to consider the different miniature customization options when working withposes, in order to avoid conflict between them and the different customization items. Up you can see a couple of poses from the elf warrior and you can see that they are much more dynamic than the human’s and orc’s ones.

On Mounted Heroes miniatures the bodies are always the same and the thing that changes during the customization process is the pose. The same thing happens on the head, we model just one head so later we can modify expressions and, in the case of the elf warrior, the hairstyle. This is the first race on which we have worked the hair and hairstyles and for it we have limited the different possible designs so when creating your own miniature we avoid conflicts with helmets, armors and shoulder pads. Still, we consider the result is really good.

After modeling the miniature itself, it comes the time of the different customizable accessories and items. In the elf process the most complicated thing was to adapt the most sensible details to 3D print, through a lot of testing finally we could reproduce them in the different 3D printing materials without giving up on the typical ornaments of the elf race.

As it is usual in our studio, we inspire our miniatures in traditional fantasy but also in ancient history, for example in the case of some elf helmets. However, for the elf weapons we have decided to follow classic fantasy in terms of elves, designing bows, swords, daggers and shields typical of the race.