Character Spotlight: Asier
Asier The Forlorn
An “Angel”, a race of lunar creatures responsible for planting the Tree of Life and the birthing of humanity. Grotesque beings, the Angels don masks when amongst the humans to appear less frightening. Asier broke the laws of his people and came to the earth in order to help guide humanity, installing himself as King of the ancient world with open arms. The consequences of that action, however, resulted in war with his fellow Angels. On the precipice of defeat, Asier broke open the Soul Tree as an act of desperation, causing untold destruction. Alone, forsaken by his people and with human civilization in ruins, Asier locked himself in the grand cathedral as penance for his actions. For a thousand years he stay, watching over the last of the relics of old, as the now flourishing humanity make their way back into the long abandoned reaches of the worlds…
The character of Asier is one that has existed in multiple forms in my head for nigh on a decade now. Originally conceived as a more traditionally angelic figure, as time went on the more elements I heaped onto him, and the more twisted and gangled the design of Asier became. Some things persisted throughout the years, however, such as the regal attire and the mask. Eventually he evolved into the nine foot tall creature he is today.
The version of Asier for this series is probably the 4th version of the character I’ve modeled and rigged so far. Asier is such an old character, in fact, that his 3d model predates Forlorn by a considerable amount. This whole thing began back in the tail end of 2017 because I was bored one day after work and decided to start building a character rig for fun. Since I had this design on hand, I thought it would be fun to give it a go and see where it took me. And so, for a few weeks I began the process of modeling and rigging the character. The initially design was far more human, proportionally. While he had many of the odd features, ultimately his silhouette was more standard than what it became. Making the rig was mostly a way to test some skills that I wanted to work more with, namely texture painting, cloth simulation, and fur simulation. As I approached the finalization of the rig, I thought to myself that I should make an animation of some sort to show it off. And so, laying in bed one evening in early 2018, a scenario sprung into my head - this character, sitting in a throne in an abandoned, ruined hall, sees a flower petal blown into the room on the wind. He stirs and investigates, as the wind carries the petal away once more. Intrigued, he follows. And that was that. Very simple, but because of its simplicity it was a very straight forward endeavor.
An unused update created right after the initial tech demo, rendered in Maya
And so, after months of work I animated and rendered out this tech demo to showcase all the things I had been learning at that point. As an animation, it’s probably somewhat underwhelming, lacking anything really interesting, as the purpose was more of a technical exercise. But I was very interested in exploring this character further. The question lingered - where did he follow the petal to? And with that, the door to Forlorn was thrown wide open, and I’ve been down this road ever since. In the interim months Asier evolved and changed from the hero of the story into the main antagonistic force, and with it his design evolved again. I wanted him to appear more mysterious, more alien, and especially more threatening. He gained additional armor, longer, more slender features, and his costume changed to be more aristocratic in appearance. Originally he was supposed to wield a spear, and it was this spear that would be the McGuffin of the film. However, it required a lot of lore set up, and in order to simplify things I decided to give him this broken off spear handle sword as his main weapon instead. And with that, he was ready to face off against Kaelis in the pilot.
The pilot came and went, and with it came another round of design. Having learned so much making that initial short, I had a bevy of idea of how to improve Asier further. So, I took another pass at his costume and some of his proportions. I updated his coat and cowl to be less form fitting and contain more natural wrinkles, redesigned the patterns of his vest and jacket, added in a cravat to give him a bit of class, and I fixed an error where the armor on his right hand and foot had their normals reversed (oops). I also gave him a top down repaint of all the textures, and resculpted the face under the mask to make it even more eldritch and alien in appearance. While you never see the face under the mask, you may get a glimpse of it in somewhere down the road…
Left - Pilot Model Right - Current Model
Even now I continue to make adjustments, because I have no chill. Never truly satisfied with the way his cloak looked, I decided to revise my method for the fur in order to make something a bit more natural looking. All that’s left for this current arc is to finish up a couple of costume variants for some things that happen to him in Part V and Part VI. That should be the end of it for quite some time, but who knows what the future holds. All I know is I intend to keep Asier around for quite some time yet.
There are still a few upcoming characters that may get their own spotlights in the future. Unlike Kaelis and Asier, these new characters don’t contain elements that predate the production, and so I don’t have much in the way of artwork or evolution, so it may be difficult to weave an interesting story. Still there is plenty of lore to get into, and I have a whole lot of lore. One day soon I’ll take a deep dive into what this world is all about.
