Bahmi Tattoo Concepts/Game Screens

With the lifting of the NDA weeks ago and permission from Trion Worlds, I thought I'd do a little write up on some tattoo designs I recently did for the Bahmi charcters in "Rift."

The Bahmi is one of the playable races in Rift. Aligned with the Defiant faction, they are descended from the half-giant Shalastiri from the plane of Air, whose bodies and especially their faces are adorned with very distinct magical tattoos called sefir.

I've been primarily animating the male Bahmi, but this would be the first time I've contributed some concept art for it... and actually got it in the game (woo!!). Fortunately, one of the character artists working on refining the textures and model of the Bahmi shared my ideas on the character as far as (tattoo) designs were concerned - so after a few discussions I presented him with these sefir concepts;

 

Bahmi facial "sefir"

(tattoo) designs

Time was short (shocker). I submitted the designs and out of these they were able to create multiple variations of the base patterns, quickly doubling the number of choices for character creation. I'm quite happy with the results, considering the constraints we had;

Male Bahmi "sefir" patterns

applied to game model

Side to side comparison

of the female Bahmi "sefir" in-game

with the sketch

I was only able to design two patterns for the female version... pretty much ran out of time, but it still made it into the game.

The other races in the game also have tattoo options, but I designed the sefir patterns with the Bahmi specifically in mind. Hopefully, the patterns remain unique to this race.

Big thanks to the character artist Shawn Shain and our art director Darren Pattenden for letting me contribute these defining characteristics for the Bahmi race.

Rift will be available for the PC on March 1st, 2011.