Kimnor and Gnumus over time

I trawled through some old stuff, and found files that I'd replaced. Still here on the blog, actually, where I had older Hero Forge versions of two of my characters, both graymen who live expatriate lives in the Hill Country. One has become a major iconic character, the deuteragonist to Dominic Clevenger's group. The other started life as a potential patron. He's still on the list of patrons, technically, but he hasn't made the list of contacts which kind of replaced them, so I'm not sure what to do with him. I still kind of like the guy, so I keep him around.

The first Kimnor image is very primitive. It's actually one of the first Hero Forge images that I made, and predates the development of my iconics. He wasn't even Kimnor yet, he was just my first attempt at visualizing a graymen. Who were still called Cursed, I think, at the time I made the image, later changed to Hyperborean, later to grayman. (As an aside, I'm actually a little on the market for a replacement for that. I don't love the name as much as I used to when I adopted it. Even then, I had lingering doubts.)

He always was a shadow sword. But at the time, I didn't know much about shading, and it hadn't occurred to me to change the default proportions, which don't look super realistic in retrospect; the heads are too big and the bodies a little too small and short. The clothes at the time look relatively modern; black jeans, modern-style hiking boots, studded punk belt, a sweater under a robe that looks as much like a bathrobe as a wizardy robe.

I don't know why I had him with a turtle and a pseudodragon, but the latter at least became part of his iconic description.

This was an improvement in almost every way. Better proportioned, probably better colored (albeit a little darker), better shading and texture, better clothing that looks more Hill Country style, even a better shadow sword. I wasn't sure, however, over time that it really represented Kimnor specifically as I'd come to envison him. I wanted a little bit darker, angrier version of the character, as his dark secret started to become more a part of his persona. And, honestly, I thought his outfit was maybe a little bit too Viking-like specifically, and I started to have doubts about having the pseudodragon, just because my first model, that I adopted as his character, had it.

This is the final version of Kimnor. As Hero Forge added thinner, more realistic sword assets, I couldn't resist not using one, and I wanted him to look just a little bit more foreign in his dress, a little bit more Hyperborean, if you will. Of course, the jacket is actually a pretty modern looking jacket, but I've never been as down on the so-called "dungeonpunk" style of art and dress as most other gamers my age who are vocal about it seem to be. I grew up in the era of post The Road Warrior after all.

Kimnor's skin looks even darker, if anything, here, although that's partly because he's cast in a very shadowy lighting effect. I'm pretty sure I used the exact same library color as the model above. I may yet modify this image slightly and make him a little lighter, however—I do want a bit more contrast between the graymen and the kemlings, and I think that specific color has occasionally been used for both, as kind of the place where they potentially meet, colorwise.

Gnumus Silusus is the friendly potential patron; a guy from Lomar who lives in Barrowmere, and prefers to stay there instead of with his own people farther north; he likes the weather, the food, and the culture; he's a pretty integrated syncretic grayman. Although he's meant to be representative of many more who are like that as well. 

Well known for his ready smile and friendly manners, he's also infamous for his tragicomic attempts to dress in hillman style, but it looks like a caricature of it. If you imagine how Marty McFly was dressed by Doc Brown as a Roy Rogers like cowboy when he first appeared in the Old West compared to the more realistic take he adopted shortly afterwards, you get the idea.

I don't need to comment as much on the details here; he's been modified twice, but not in such a way that there's really any core re-envisioning of him, just improvements as new assets have been added.

UPDATE: New Kimnor with slightly lightened skin tone. I think this is better in terms of representing the race.

UPDATE 2: I've been slowly going through my old models and updating them. Here's Javaira Khanwar, from the anti-PC group, and Jareth Grym with a modified head. I really like the age slider, by the way. It doesn't matter for a lot of characters, but for the ones that I can use it, it makes faces look great when it's slid nearly all the way to the right.