DMUGA Week 21 - Characters Continued... :)

After the first week of these character projects, I was feeling good in general. I had a basis to which I could form my Visual Design character, and I had most of the body done for the 3D Gladiator. This blog will be about how I've developed them both, up until the stage I am now.

Monday - Visual Design

For this week, we had 2nd year students helping us with anything we needed to ask questions on, give some crits, and advice on how to go about this project. Chris let us know that we had to model our character this week using Plasticine or sculpey, although, since I already have Plasticine, I'll stick with that for this one.
Even though I'd love to model my character right away, I know that I hadn't done enough development and only 1 orthographic view of the character's head. So, before starting my digital final on Wednesday, and my model on Saturday, I decided to develop my character until I was happy with it. Here's some of the things I did:

Part of the character development

Modelling from Plasticine

Gun made from card and painted with black acrylic paint

I have never drawn an orthographic view of a person before this project, so throughout it I admit that I had to look at quite a few reference images to observe how it's done. I think that whenever I do this now, I need to draw the anatomy underneath everything before continuing, at least until I am comfortable and confident with how to draw the body from different angles.
I went from a western character, to a thug, to an explorer, and finally settled on a hunter. I wanted to see how he'd work in different personas, and thought that the hunter just seemed to work.

Tuesday - Game Production 

As there there is no timetabled lessons this week, I just carried on as usual and went to the labs all day to work on my gladiator. I went in hoping that I'd have the full body done by today and could start working on props. However, I had 1:30hrs wasted trying to set up a reference for his ear because for whatever reason, the computer I was on had some settings I have no idea about and wasn't applying my texture properly! I tried importing the model into a new file in case I accidentally changed a setting, but ended up just swapping computers... All of that time just wasted. Anyway, from there I got the head done, and now I need to adjust his arm shapes, plus cut the tri count down by roughly 260 to meet the brief of under 2500 tris.
I have to say, connecting the head and ears were a pain because obviously there were more verts on the border of the head than the body, so I had to play about with that quite a bit. Unfortunately, there is more triangles in my mesh now, but I don't know of another way to go about this.

I need to do some more on it tonight (the night I am publishing this blog), but and I hope to cut the tris down quite a bit and get the base for my character, and finally start thinking about modelling parts for the armour/props.

The rest of the week - Getting things sorted

I know this week is supposed to be a week where we model our interesting character and get feedback from year 2 students, which is what I've done and it was rather helpful. However, I have had some personal things to sort out which have bogged me down for a very long time this week (It isn't an excuse but let's face it, some things that happen really do prevent your mind from working properly), which isn't exactly helping my studies, but I have managed to get the life drawing homework done and clearly some of the character development for the project done too. Here's the digital painting of my character, it isn't great but it is my first one I've ever done completely made up:

Character digital Paint

There are a lot of improvements to be made on this, I.e. I composition, the way I've done the grass, the colouring on the character. I tried using a technique I've seen others doing which is to do the grey-scale first, then apply a 'colour' layer on top of it. However, this didn't work too well for me. This shading on the gun is pretty good, but for the skin tone and his clothes it isn't exactly the greatest. The good thing is that I've learnt from doing this and hopefully the next time I use this technique, I will really try and get the grey-scale tones right, or at least, better.

To summerise what I've done this week, I have to say that I have taken it a bit easy because of a certain situation as mentioned, and I hope to be back to full steam this coming week.