Elena Mossman

As a quick rundown on the character, it goes as thus: Elena Mossman is the pre-release predecessor to Half-Life 2's Judith Mossman. Originally she operated an undersea arctic lab by the name of Kraken Base. Initially friendly to the player, she would turn traitor and raise an army of Stalkers (which survived in the final game with a different design and placement in the story) to wreak havoc. With a blonde bobcut and makeup she was the femme fatale of the old story drafts.

Elena was my first foray into Source Engine character modeling. Rather than slavering over accuracy to the questionable-quality screenshot of the lost original model, I chose instead to use the final game's model as a starting point (specifically the Episode 1 variant, as her arctic coat could be easily modified). This would also allow me to skip the stage of setting up the vertex animation for her face (though I did manage to get away with slightly sharpening her cheekbones).

I've never been interested in absolute accuracy when adapting early HL2 material for my own ends, so I chose to make some - to my mind - improvements. The two main areas were her jacket and hair. For her jacket I split it into two tones of purple, for the purposes of being generally more visually lively. The original textures were single-tone (not counting the black trim parts), which would lead to her entire torso being this smeary smudge of purple when viewed from across a room. As for her hair, the original model's can only be described as "bananas glued to her head" and very much a relic of another time in character design history. By utilizing Source's "jigglebone" system, I could give her a fuller volume that moved on its own. Owing to the trial-and-error process of fine-tuning the jigglebones this stage was very arduous and the final result was ultimately a compromise. It could have been better but for a first try it could have been worse, too.

In fact "could have been better but for a first try it could have been worse" sums up the exercise as a whole in my view. I'm just glad that I have this discipline in my toolset now.