Melkor
(Morgoth Bauglir)
The pictures of The Great Enemy are more numerous and larger than some of my other Sims not only because he was the Big Bad Guy of The Silmarillion, but also because he represents a triumph in mesh and skin making for me. Now that I've gotten the hang of texture mapping and such, I was able to render the entire non-regalia body of Melkor in one piece, with a single skin. The version with the regalia has only three pieces, and that largely because the Iron Crown set with the three Silmarils (an accessory that took eleven separate initial pieces to create) needed a more complex skin than could be managed using the head bitmap alone. The body meshes for the two sets are different because of the sleeves; I wanted the plain outfit to be without the gauntlets, and that was most easily managed with a separate body mesh.
Tolkien said that before his evil and his attachment to the world he had marred became reflected in the appearance of the incarnate body he assumed, Melkor was a tall and dark figure of great majesty (and terror). The metaphysical opposite of his brother Manwë, Melkor wore black, and his emblem was a plain black banner without embellishment. In developing him, I tried a number of nearly solid black outfits, but they needed some enhancement to work and convey the proper aura of majesty, so I used silver and dark red to provide some visual interest. His head mesh is based on Manwë's, which is why is has the wavy aspect to it, but it is long, and pulled back into three braids with silver clasps (which you can just barely see in the image below). All in all, he has a vaguely "Russian" feel to him that I find not altogether inappropriate. He makes me think of Rasputin, and Tolkien tells us that Melkor, who was the greatest and most powerful and brilliant of all the Ainur descended into nihilistic madness when Eru would not grant him the power of creation and he could not usurp the world his brethren also worked to shape -- another genius gone mad.
