Savena Nyght Design and Concept

Of all my characters there is one that came at the worst possible time, falling between the cracks of two problems happening at the same time, Savena Nyght. The first problem was caused largely by me and the second problem was caused by forces far larger than I could comprehend and though she was not stillborn, Savena suffered as a result. During December and January I kept having a series of repetitive nightmares about an altered 1950's history, post WW2 civil war. In my dreams I kept waking shell shocked with ringing ears after an RPG had hit a window in what looked like a school science laboratory. Gradually the dream kept evolving and changing as more of this odd dream started disrupting my sleep, with a timeline both filling the moments prior to the blast and little snippets of an evolved, longer variation of the dream. Before the blast I came to learn the reason for waking shell shocked was that I had looked out of the window just as the RPG was launched at the window and been thrown across a room by the blast. I would awake in the room with bullets ricocheting all around me as other characters in the dream attempted to find an escape route from the onslaught as the building was largely torn apart by gunfire and small explosions. As I started crawling to flee the building I caught sight of my reflection in a smashed mirror on the floor, however the character was not me but an approximately 14-16 year old girl?

Throughout December and January I started piecing together little shards of a story from this odd repetitive dream and started forming a basic idea for a very new and different story. Separate from the realms of Evelyn and Fae, darker, more moving and far deeper than anything I had really considered working on so far. I decided to start with a completely clean sheet for a character just for the story and set to work creating a character to match the one from my dreams and as such a lot of her design would be guess work. I wanted her to be transitioning from a girl into a woman, so she would be quite feminine if slightly underdeveloped, carrying traits of blossoming into a woman while still having hallmarks of her youth. Height wise I wanted her to be roughly the same height as Evelyn so around 140cm tall as she was still growing though her hips and waist would be clearly quite feminine her chest would still be developing. Intentionally this was so that she could easily be mistaken as being a young boy rather than a girl and for both the scenes and story I had in mind this would be crucial.

Facially though was where I really wanted Savena to shine, like Evelyn and Fae I wanted her to really carry expressions and emotions, so that images of her could punch hard with raw emotions. I gave her a very rounded face and equally large cheeks so that if she was smiling you could really feel her joy but equally when things were bad, you didn’t need a mass of context to understand her thoughts. As I got her basic design mapped out I ran a few basic tests to put her in situations like I had in mind to either tell stories or just for a short simple but often blunt means of storytelling. In a way unlike Evelyn or Fae I wanted Savena to be able to tell stories almost purely with her facial expressions and for this her final tweak would be deep, vividly turquoise eyes. At first glance she is unbelievably soft and sweet but deep within a fighter and gritty survivor and in this regard she would excel. Finally I wanted her to have a delicate and beautiful name to suit her design, eventually opting for Savena, a name which I took from a river in Italy.

Just as I started getting Savena refined and render ready I made my switch from Daz to Blender and whilst trying to get Evelyn to work in Blender I decided to start tweaking Savena to be geared for the cycles rendering engine. In a way before Savena was ready for her first Iray render she was reworked purely for the cycles engine but the problem for Savena was that I was writing Sleepy Hollow and as such Evelyn and Sleepy Hollow had to take priority. Whilst I worked on Evelyn, Savena got her first basic tweaks for Blender, new skin tones and remapped eyes, all geared towards eventually creating a new world just for Savena. Initially I planned to use Savena for creating single images of conflict and the effect that such horrors have upon those unlucky enough to be caught up in the carnage that follows. However just as I ran the first of these images a far larger problem presented itself, not a 3D problem but more of a global disaster and moral dilemma. The very day that I completed the first image of a young Savena walking through a desolate and largely destroyed town the Ukraine-Russian war broke out. Morally I couldn’t bring myself to start posting images of the horrors of war when friends and fellow artists were having their homes and lives blown to pieces by Russian bombs, that same day I decided to shelve the project for the time being.