Character Fan Art

Final Fantasy IX was the first real Final Fantasy experience I had, and I’ve loved the game since I was a kid. There are a couple of really wonderful fanarts of Princess Garnet / Dagger out there already, but none scratched a certain itch I’ve had to see the characters of FFIX in a romantic high fantasy style — in something like a Lord of the Dark Souls of Skyrim vibe. Before this, I toiled for a long time on a fanart of Blank from FFIX, but at some point switched my focus to Garnet / Dagger.

I’ve worked on this for many months. I started with a quick-and-dirty mockup in Daz Studio and then used one of their rigged Genesis figures as a base mesh; the vast majority of sculpting, modelling, materializing, posing, lighting, etc. etc. etc. was done in Blender. There are so many assets, tools, methods, etc. in this project from so many sources that I cannot possibly name them all. I’ve learned so much and had so much fun (and experienced so much frustration), but I’m really pretty happy with the result. There’s always more I’d like to do, but I’m content with this as finished, and it’s time to move on.

Update 9 June 2024:

I finally spent the time to learn hair grooming in Blender well enough to update this project. I was really unhappy with her hair for a long time, but I’m much more satisfied with it now.

I also took the opportunity to make lots of small adjustments.

(I may re-render some of the other angles / new angles now that the hair is updated, too, but for now I’ll leave it at this.)