Wilderness Warrior
To start off our first week in third year we were thrown into work; We must do 3 professional practice briefs chosen from any area we like. Whether its 3D or 2D there is different categories in each, such as character, environment, prop or UI and branding; each set also has a style: realistic, semi-stylised and stylised. Here it is in a table format:
The boxes highlighted in orange are the ones I am most likely going to go for. The stylised character being the first. Each brief has 3 weeks allocated for them so you have to be spot on with your planning.
I have decided to start off with the Stylised 3D character brief which basically gives you a concept in which you have to fix a bit and then model. Seem easy right? well I decided to make it harder for myself by re-concepting it completely but keeping the main elements of the original character. Here is the original image:
I have planned out the next three weeks loosely so i know when things should be done by, roughly:
I am already ahead of plan due to me starting to unwrap at the end of this week; this means that if I end up with extra time at the end I might even do some animations for the character.
To start this project I took the original concept and broke down the items to see what they were made of, I then moved the most important and interesting objects over to a new design. Here is my process below:
After analysing the materials, I decided that if the character is miniature I would be cuter and more plausible if it was an animal. Thus I did a quick sketch of a cat in the same style; I felt that it enhanced the design of the character so I decided to use woodland animals to see how they would look; due to it being a wilderness warrior not a domestic cat warrior. I chose a squirrel, raccoon, frog, otter, badger and mouse. The feedback I got from peers was to go with either the frog or otter, so I compared their silhouette and decided that the otter had a stronger silhouette. After deciding on the otter I got feedback from a tutor that said he looked more like a meerkat and too blobby, so I decided to try and define the shapes better but I feel like the original was better so I stuck with that one.
The next step was colour experimentation but just before this I got some feedback from a different tutor telling me to lengthen the otters arms, make the knee guards bigger, make his acorn shoulder guards larger and make him look more like a warrior. I took this on board changed the things he asked for and added an eye patch and a scar on the nose. I feel like this was a massive improvement and gives the character more interesting features.
Here is my colour exploration at the start I used the orginal colour palette but added different accent colours to see what colour might work better instead of orange; but i felt like I should test completely different colour palette. In the next section I looked at rainbow eucalyptus trees and used the amazing colours from them and incorporated it into my designs. However my peers and I felt that even though they are natural colours they felt too un-natural and saturated for it to work with the character. So I decided to do season themed ones and they worked a lot better and after some more feedback from a tutor I added camo pattern to the designs; as shown below:
I'm a little bit unsure about the results I've come out with; due to the camo throwing off the design. However I have decided I'm going with an autumn theme because everyone I have gotten feedback off of says that that one is the strongest set of colours and matches the characters design the best.
Moving onto modeling I strip modeled the face of the character then used symmetry to make sure that both sides were identical. I fell that strip modeling is the best way to model a face because you can get the topology the way you want it and there isn't too much to deal with in one go; if you had used a sphere to start there would have been a lot of vertices to start with.
After modelling the face I moved on to the hat and used object paint to put the spines onto the hat. This saved a lot of time and later on when I needed to cut down on tris It was easy to redo this.
After finishing the head and helmet I brought in a drawing of the otter for reference and used it to help model the body. Unlike the head I modeled the body from a box and extruded and shaped it into the right form. I also made a leaf eye-patch for one of the eyes and modeled the chest armor.
The next step was to make the hands; I did this by using a square and extruding fingers and a thumb off of it, then turbo smoothing it. I then fixed the topology and welded it to the body. I also used this technique for making the feet.
After finishing the hands and feet i made the knee and shoulder guards and the string for his chest armour, knee guards and belt. I did this by using splines and then path deforming a cylinder to fit around his body.
After I had finished the modeling the hard part of cutting down the tris came along. I had to cut the down from over 5000 to 4000; it took a lot of work but I don't think the model looks much different even though it has a lot less triangles. When It came to the helmet and props, I modeled the props and then cut down the helmet until it was under 2000 tris.
Here is the final model with fixed smoothing groups ready to be unwrapped. I have added 3 planes to his face for fur alphas.
Next week I will finish unwrapping and decide on the colour scheme and textures I'm going to use for his clothes. I will hopefully be close to finishing the texturing so that I can fit in my stretch goals of rigging and animating him.
Overall I am very pleased with what I have managed to get done in a week; I wasn't easy but compared to my work output in 2nd year it has sky rocketed from that. Now it's up to me to keep up the good work.