Character design project: re- imagining a tales character for games
polycounter lvl 8
OK so here's the project. it's a personal project for university, and what has been is how re-imaging a character from a tale affect it's design for games. then re-imagining a character of my choosing. I chose Aladdin for my re-interpretation. think enslaved:odyssey to the west if you want to know what i mean by re-imagining/ re-definition where only monkey really has any visual cues to his counterpart. should be mentioned, i did write a short story, it's about 1400 words which is why i don't really want to put it on here, but i can if people think it would help. anyway view these images and tell em what you think
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from there i took some of the silhouettes that i liked, grabbed some tracing paper, and sketched over them. i like this technique, because it it allows me to take the silhouettes i liked and generate a lot of ideas from the core silhouette. i also played with robotic limbs, I feel this is where sci fi began to get stuck in my mind a little.
from there I did some head sketches, wanting to find a face or some faces that i could use as a basis for my final character design, and possibly help the flow of the values. i tried a range of different shapes, even a female face too see if it might change my mind on doing a male character, but ultimately, i really like 2 faces I did first more than anything else on the first page. the scarf like mask, like a snood, and the spiky haired male with the button on the neck of his coat, i id try an alternative angle with the masked mans face with the piercing on the second page and tried a more traditional mask next to it, but it was more to figure out his face as half of it was covered.
in the value stage, I took some of the sketches from the second stage, some of the negative form drawing on the 1st stage, I also used 1 or 2 silhouettes for designs that didn't come from the earlier stages. the value design was interesting because of this, a lot of designs in the stage just popped into my mind with no real influence from the previous stages.
It was here when I started doing a lot of bag designs in the values, that I started sketching out some proper bag designs, as well as some fanny packs, to see what i could come up with and if any was interesting.
this was a sketch for the design of his phone, as some of the bags had phone straps, i though it would be cool if the smart phone, was a robot that could hack, sneak around and do tasks, cause then it would literally be a smart phone. i wanted it to look a little generic, reason being i wanted people to pick up on the fact that it was a smart phone quickly.
the 19th design(or 3rd row 2nd to the right on the values) got a lot of variations from monochromatic, to complimentary colours, the 2 middle at the top i believe are triadic. 2 of the made it further as seen before, the one too the right end got some colour variations as well. the almost modern/ current clothed were complimentary, mainly focusing on blue and orange, the middle one got taken further . the 5 that followed were monochromatic mostly aside from the one with the glowing purple mask, the red one got taken further. the 2 white haired ones in jackets were plays on complimentary colours once again. the one's that look like the British flag almost, were plays on primary and secondary colours. the last 4 were monochromatic, but the black and red one got taken further as I liked that design.
http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?264415-Character-design-project-re-imagining-a-tales-character-for-games
i'm creating this post due to having issues with using that forum.
first there were these 2 initial sketches, i felt that if i repeated the exact same process from start to finish it might hinder creativity, so this time this sketch and the one below were made.
from here the values were made
and then the colour schemes were, i played more with monochromatic this time, as it's something i felt i didn't play around with, or get to work properly with the previous iteration.
i also sort of scrapped the second sketch by the end of this process, i kinda got confused with how he'd look and how the clothed would work during the sketching stage. the farther i went down the process the more i didn't like it cause i just couldn't see it working functionally.
Overall great stuff! Awesome.
first i worked out some poses
then i sketched over them shading values with pencil
the moodboard which i made during the third iteration
http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?264415-Character-design-project-re-imagining-a-tales-character-for-games
link to the concept art thread
i did a few more values to really nail the values, and shapes of the design. the colour stage comes next
the colour schemes I've come up with. some have similar colour schemes used before, I wanted to see how they looked on other designs.
I put the schemes in a them like order. though it has been brought to my attention that there is still a bleeding of themes
i sampled the colours from each picture in the environment mood board to see what the character will be clashing against or blending in with. it almost seems that a fair majority of colours came out, which considering the character is a thief, probably for the best
some new colour schemes. i feel as though i have been repeating myself somewhat colour scheme wise. though i have gone through a lot these 3 iterations of design so i guess it's to be expected to a degree.
should be noted, the phrases like sci-fi, middle eastern, are where i feel the inspiration for said colour schemes came from. though for some i'm not sure and just put them where i thought best .
you may also have noticed the hair on most is almost identical to the character from the first iteration, I altered it's length slightly but it's the same style. I just liked the hairstyle for the character. though I did come up with a more punk-ish hair to see how that would look.
SCI FI/ Middle eastern-ish
The pants/ trousers are more saturated.
these pants/ trousers are less saturated.
altered
SCI-FI/ Cyberpunk-ish
also tried making a quick background thing
here's the model as it currently stands with most of the form there. to me it's important to get the form right for a model or the clothes may/ probably won't look right. the feet have that gap because of the style of shoe and how i plan to create them via creating a new subtool via masking the foot area, hence the foots lack of toes and such in comparison to the rest of the body.
looking at it now. the head may need widening.
second progress shot, fixed some errors that were pointed out to me by my project supervisor
You are right about the butt, for that, once again I'd take a look at some anatomy references to properly reshape those forms. Again in the anatomy stage the brushes that are your best friend are clay buildup, trim dynamic(to get the various planes), and smooth. Damien Standard can also help with blocking in muscle forms.
The progress shots in normal and perspective mode.(previous were all in perspective)
normal
perspective
(edit i think i slightly edited the stomach between screencapping the normal then perspective. just in case the perspective was done after so you may wanna use that one when looking)
just sorta noticed i haven't shown any of his clothes yet. and now they are kinda done.
I think due to time constraints i won't be able to make massive changes, minor one's i might
any crit's welcome
also noticed from first pic the butt is to shapely formed in the baggy trousers so I altered it