Shawoman came from a character design group exercise in Gobelins. Each of us was given a keyword to work with, mine was ‘Femme Fatale’ while my teammates (Sophie Barocas and Yuanqing Cai) had ‘Cute’ and ‘Intellectual’ respectively. The task was to choose a story setup, design our characters while directing scenarios based on them. Ultimately, we’ll sculp the characters using Plastiline then re-create them in 3D.

We decided to set our story in one of my favourite Vietnamese ethnic community, the Red Yao, or Dao Đỏ in Vietnamese.

I love designing villains and anti-heroes so I had a lot of fun with this exercise. Sophie’s character, Chi Linh, and mine had a good chemistry right away while we did not relate so much to Master, Ying’s character. But the three of us used it to our advantage to create this story:

Shawoman is the village’s healer. She has an assistant, Chi Linh, who helps out with picking herbs for her mistress’ rituals. The village’s eldest, Master, is sceptical about Shawoman and her seeming ungodly talent, seeing that she can cure someone who should have been dead.

When Master found out Shawoman’s secret, that she uses necromancy to bring someone back from the dead for her personal gain, he challenges Shawoman into a fight.

Chi Linh, loyal to Shawoman, but innocent of heart and good-natured, is torn between the two…

Modeled in Blender 2.8
Rigged with AdvancedSkeleton in Maya 2018
The final battle!