Noob looking for feedback :D
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Hi everyone
,My name is Alfredo and I am new to the awesome Polycount community, during last year summertime I made a fantastic course about character design starting from concept to modeling and I am starting to work in my own projects, as I am still a newbie in terms of design wanted to get some feedback that I could use to improve myself.:thumbup:
So no more talking and let me Present to you all, ladies; gentleman and robots.
The Plant Girl! (at least for now until I come up with another name
)
I want it to be a Creature that protects nature, but don't want her to look to cute rather a mix of danger; agresive; protector and naive looking in some way.
Replies
Thanks! Actually you are maybe right though her not having her hair defined yet it all looks kinda reeflike creature, maybe I should aim it that way or change some things to give it a more forest or jungle feeling, though she only has some vines around her body and nothing that really defines her, I will keep working
About her protecting all kinds of nature, in the end I decided I will stick to the flora and leave the fauna aside, that doesn't mean she wont be kind to some animals or so but instead she is more involved with plant life than animals itself.
Now about her relation with plants, I decided she will be more conected to surface life than to underwater, the reason behind this is that I want to make her look that she has been created from surface flora and give her a resemblance to a mythical creature that protects her home from other who try to harm it (and could be quite agressive if she has to).
After all this thoughts it kinda suits her character to be based around the enviroment she was born in and problably being defined by it in greater measure. But I would also add some details of other plant life that will conect her in some way with other enviroments.
Now for her enviroment, after taking a look I want it to be magical and a cross between jungle and forest and for a quick reference I would like it to be like Maleficent's forest in the Disney remake for Sleeping Beauty.
Sorry for this massive reply by the way
But everything is mostly Ok now and I'm ready to keep going with my work, got some hairstyles done and probably more in the way as I am doing them as soon as I get an idea for one ( jesus, I never would have thought that making hairstyles was this difficult >.<) Now tell me what do you think about them and see if I can start building up some poses and choosing the elements of design that fit her the most
Now see you soon
Plus, starting to mix clothing aswell and see if I can start studing her poses and starting to refine the concept
Maybe it's too heavy or something doesn't work properly with the rest of the elements, I will keep working on it and see what comes out of it
Hm, actually I think I could explore that hairstyle deeper and archieve something quite unique and wonderfull, plus it will fit her character quite well, and could make her look as a Living entity more than a nature creature. Gonna dive into it see what it comes up and if you like it
How do you find the clothing tests by the way? Do you like the mix I've made or would you choose other elements?
Let me know what you think
Both of them, I would like to refine the concept giving it some details and colours so then I can model her in 3d. I will also love to make a ilustration of her with some nice digital painting
I'm planing to refine a concept, be able to make a decent and interesting Ilustration about her, and then model her in 3d (probably from a Zsphere as the results probably will be more organic) and then retopologize her, bake normals and occlusion maps so then I could use Mudbox and photoshop for hand painted textures.
So after all that she could be able to be used in a game or be animated, etc...
Leaving a pair of sketches of the face with a combo of two of the masks that are in the previous post, and the root hairstyle , let me know what you think
Don't worry about the proportions, her massive head will be fixed, otherwise she will star having neck problems
This is the image with the references.
Nos you can see I've kept some of the thing I had earlier, and decided to mix the "mask type" face with one of the hairs I had before, making her more "flowerish"
Here are some things I thought might help push the design and execution further
A lot of things are cool but I'll be pointing out some stuff to think about for this piece or future ones .
A - Character expression is so important, it is basically what you want the overall feeling of the picture to give us. Think about when you see a photograph or portrait of someone, when they smile or seem sad, it affects what we feel when looking at the image. So the choice of the expression is very important. Other things like color and pose can contribute to push that emotion further.
In this case, I thought it might be more logic for her to be happy since she has little forest fellows lying around to play with. That was an interesting idea and I like the design of the small creatures. It could've been sadness but if you chose that make sure her body language also tells us that. As long as it is consistent with the action or context of the image
B- The pose, she is currently sitting, seems a bit uncomfortable, creating a magic effect.
The overall pose was not bad at all, but for a magic spell, sitting down is a bit inappropriate, so replacing the effect with a creature seemed more logic.
C- Also if you draw the character interacting with the environment like the bark, make sure she seems sitting in a proper way because right now it seems like she almost falling off.
Try to simplify your design and ideas to the max and see how that affects the readability of your work. That is the best advice I can give you,
Hope this helps and good work! keep going! : )
To sum it up, try to get inspired by what you read and then the historical/medieval book reference, it helped me a lot to digest a text first, think of an idea to portrait it and then look up for reference poses and other alike online. Maybe it can work for you.
Thanks also to Miguelnarayan, I have plenty of references of dryads and fauns which I got inspired by to create her, but I have to say I will read a lot about dryads and fauns to see how they supposed to act so from there I could also redraw the pose that I already have following the points Wizo gave me and end up with a better overall feeling.
Thanks a lot to both of you, I'll keep up the good work!:D