Fan Remaster: Bastila Shan
Bastila Shan Turntable
To create her likeness I scoured forums for ideas on who's face fans could see in Bastila. The answer was undoubtedly Kate Beckinsale. But I added an element of Emilia Clarke from what I could see of her old game mesh.
For the first time, I used Marvelous Designer to achieve the initial garment underneath all the leather clothing components.
How could I just make Bastila and NOT do a more darker, mysterious garbed-in-all-black Dark Side Bastila? Pretty much every Dark Side Revan player's dream apprentice!!
And of course! Remaster Bastila needs her lightside / darkside alignment pictures as well as her little portraits that would appear in the game menus!
The goal of the project was to make her real-time game-ready, so here she is as a WIP in UE4 whilst I still try to figure out the more advanced components of materials and shaders!
Usually I like to divide a character's textures into several maps of varying sizes but for Bastila I tried to minimize the number of maps as much as possible. She has just 3: Costume / Body, Face & Hands and Hair & Eyelashes, all at 4K.
I set myself a challenge to create the costume entirely in Zbrush to become totally comfortable with the software via process of Masking & Extraction, and choosing not to rely on imported base meshes from Maya like I typically would do.
Bastila currently has a very typical humanoid rig and although skinning certainly isn't my strong suit, I added additional joints for the draped cloth components of her costume and even her pigtails! She also features a very basic facial rig,
Bastila has always been a favourite character of mine since I first played the golden RPG in 2003. After recently watching The Last Jedi over Christmas, it reminded me of MY favourite female Jedi, and that was when I decided to undertake the project of 'remastering' Bastila as best I could and as close as possible to a AAA quality game-ready character. After working at it for a couple of months on and off while handling freelance and other projects, I'm happy to upload her here and call her done for now!
I tried as best as possible to re-create every element of her design in painstaking detail, and at times had to pretty much re-imagine some parts from the ground up as there's unfortunately only so much you can get from a model over a decade old! She currently features a simple body and face rig with morph targets and a simple idle animation, I do have plans to revisit her and work on mimicking some good ol' in-game animations at a later date!
