Minus design ramble

Minus has been revealed a while ago but I personally couldn't get to draw her for real. Recently I started sketching her and thought "I have no idea what I'm looking at".

So I might not be the only one so that's why I decided to analyse the design and share my thoughts and notes with you ^^)

For those of you who wonder who Minus is - she is a new Quadimension's voicebank for SynthV of course. She is said to be sth like alternative Stardust but at the same time it's not our old Star. Idk really but we'll have to wait for more lore. They do have different voice providers so I assume they are different entities. Let's treat it similar as with Stardust Zero.

So the design. It's complicated. Even as for Medium5 standard it's hard to even start with the general shape. And as usual we don't have good reference. Thanks to Haru.jpg, who worked for Quadimension, we have variation design that can help us understand how the official one works.

But as you might notice it's not accurate in 100%. As clothes on torso and material on the back seems different than on the official illustration:

So given the designs I'd say most likely work like this:

It's of course my analysis of it, not official reference. However did my best to check what I drew with both Atdan illustration and xiao reference. I belive it's a cape since we can't see any other elements hanging loosely at the back. Also on Atdan art front part of sleeve seems to not be linked with back part on the lower part of both. Very nice elements for dynamism.

About the flying stuff. It consists 2 dodecahedrons. The figure is a regular block made of 12 regular pentagons. I made them in Blender for reference if anyone needs it and here are screenshots (coz I'm too lazy to render it). If you want I can provide blend file with them or you can try making them yourself. You can start with basic cube. It's quite easy to do.

And with knowing what it is and having a model rest is relatively easy. We have cloth like part above blocks and the eye shaped something that is placed at the end. Also the cloth like small parts closer to the body. Now above the head and around torso there are quite simple shapes easy to draw, symmetrical. Probably flat or light effects (the smaller purple "eyes"). I hope to see it better when her 3d model will be released. Last flying elements are flat chains around the body.

Oof. That's a lot. I've seen Ddickky photo on weibo where was visible parts of Minus design so this part will hopefully get some clarification sooner or later.

I'll leave the scythe since I'm not having that much time but it looks quite simple. General shape and decorations are quite regular...

So after staring at it for... quite some time... It's good it has details and it seems someone put lot of work into it but I don't see if it will move nicely. As a game design I hope to see it moving and making most of its potential. I'd say upper part is done pretty creatively. Sleeves are looking really great and part of them being a cape is really interesting idea. A halo like element are quite awesome too. The few eye shaped elements might be really good details for adding dynamism and rythm to the illustration or animation sequence. Shoes are perf as always. But the feeling that back of the design does not exist besides cape and pants... it's kinda disturbing for me. Looking at haru design - official one probably has this kind of cover as well. Let's hope to get more official art to see.

I'd say I probably won't draw it digitally any time soon. With other stuff this is just quite a lot of work if you want to draw all of this.

I hope getting this all together and my little notes will be helpful. I'd love to see people draw her more. As well as other Quadimension characters. Especially Muxin. He is like unwanted child at this point xD

Artworks by Haru.jpg, Atdan and xiao葉有囍

And few by me...

Link to haru post: https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/84986037