Hey Everyone!

Kicking off my thread for this course!

I’ll do my best to explain everything as thoroughly as possible as I go.
I’m also combining this into one fat PDF which I’ll upload at the end of the course.

I’ll try to give reasons on why I’m choosing what I’m choosing, or why I’m doing something a specific way. Ill also add random notes and bits of info ive gleaned along the way. Forgive me if it’s a lot to read, but I’m going to take the time to write it all, so too bad. I hope to eventually flesh everything out with a lot of pictures as well.

Also here are the links to the other guys and girls that im working with!

Mr Skullface
Almighty_Gir
YBourykina
Funky Bunnies

Stage 1:

•Choosing my girl.
•Gathering reference.
•Drawing & painting my girl.

Choosing my Girl:

I decided early on, that there were 3 things I wanted to be the focal points of this course for me:

•Nice Face.
•Nice Hair.
•Great final pose, full of great feminine lines, movement and expression.

I also knew I wanted to create an anime styled girl.

Because of this criteria I want to go for a very simple character overall to really draw attention to those 3 main points. I don’t want to spend hours crafting complex armor, or epic amounts of cloth when I could spend that time refining the face, hair and executing feminine lines and the simple character as best I can.

I wanted to focus on making a really nice face that I could then pose and present different expressions, because it’s something I’ve always wanted to do.

I also wanted to create a really amazing head of long hair, full of movement and expression, because I think it’s a very lack luster area of the characters I've created in my personal and professional career so far.

The anime style choice is because I’ve recently discovered just how extremely challenging it is to execute simple forms, as well as other reasons:

• There are very few details to hide my mistakes behind. Every weakness I have is on display. ie Can’t sculpt cloth? Well this simple and plain blouse is definitely going to show that!
• The character design and personality is often at the forefront and on display clearly and not hidden behind layers of complexity and noise. Awesome, but again very challenging for me to portray and capture from head to toe.
• The colors are bold, contrasty, yet balanced and often very clean. Generally 1 or 2 primary colors with a couple of repeatable motifs (usually a complimentary color).

Too often in my experience with character art so far it’s been very easy for me to hide behind photos, dirt, and layers of armor detail to make things look gritty, ‘cool’ and complicated. It has helped me get this far but I need to progress and address my weaknesses!

So with these thoughts in mind, I set out to pick my girl.

I had about 100 girls instantly that I wanted to model hah! So it was very difficult to make a top 10 list and refine that down to just 1.

Here is my Top 10 List in no particular order:

1) Echidna – Queens Blade
2) Hastune Miku - VN02 version
3) Kiriko Hattori - Shunya Yamashita
4) Kureha – Shining Tears
5) Lacia – Beatless
6) Misato Katsuragi (plugsuit version) Neon Genesis Evangalion
7) Rin Tohsaka - Fate/Stay Night
8) Yoko - Gurren Lagann
9) Hatsune Miku – World is Mine Version
10) A concept by the legendary rewhy.com that I couldn’t find online, only in poppic artbook.

I sent my top 10 around to a few friends, along with what I wanted to focus on, and got their recommendations along with my own thoughts and feelings which enabled me to pick my girl.

I ended up chosing Hatsune Miku – The World is Mine version.



She meets all the criteria, and will help me address many of my weaknesses. I’m super stoked and tbh I can’t wait until I finish her so I can see the result haha!

Gathering Reference:

2 Things:

1) It should be obvious but it’s important to find relevant reference for what I want to achieve.
I want ref that highlights and reminds me of the things I want to focus on, nice face, nice hair, feminine lines etc And include as many shots of Miku as possible – BUT ONLY GOOD ONES!

When I look at this page, I want to be inspired by the awesomeness of Miku.

2) Alongside this inspirational / reference page it’s good to have one singular reference point to use as my major / overall direction. In my case its a nice photo of the 'world is mine' version of Miku. I use this to provide the answers whenever I get stuck on something.

My inspirational/reference page for Miku:



My overall directional reference:



For the course, I'm going to attempt to replicate and capture this version of Miku as closely as I can using 'next gen' techniques.

INFO: There’s something I’ve noticed in my experience so far and that is, no matter how cool an idea sounds when you first talk about it with people, each step in bringing that idea towards reality in some fashion or another diminishes its original magnificence.

What I mean by that is, say we need a new epic chick character for our game, here’s what might happen in the typical course of things:

1) We brainstorm what she might look like with Concept artists & Art director.
2) We find concept art or photo-reference to start the visualisation.
3) Concept artist produce some pieces.
4) We pick and refine a concept.
5) We model and texture the character.
6) We rig the character.
7) We animate the character.
8) We see the final result in the game.

At each one of these steps, the original grandeur will almost certainly get watered down further and further, due to concept art clarity, technical issues, shader issues, rigging restrictions, animation problems, communication problems between departments and many other things. A lot of these can be avoided somewhat by designing within a closed box and 'to the system', but I truly don’t believe in stymieing the creative process by technical limitations so early on.

I believe it’s especially important for unique concepts to start off WAYYYY out there; go for the absolute extreme version of what you want to do:

Dude: We want her to be sci fi and in a mech suit!
Me: NO!! We want an epic space bunny girl in an mech suit with 2 rail guns the size of warships and one of them transforms into a giant clawed fist for close quaters melee action!
Dude: But our game is pacman.
Me: Too Bad.

Start crazy because no matter what idea you run through that pipeline, it’s going to be watered down by the time it reaches the game. If you start off mediocre it will end up super ordinary at best. So start with super awesome insane biblical epic-ness and hopefully you’ll end up with awesomeness.

Next Step: Drawing and Painting my Girl.

This is taking place right now..... Stay tuned!

Subb'd! This will be good... proceed!

Suuuuuuuuuuubscribing. Can't wait to see the progress.

The only thing that bothers me is fluctuating size of her breasts...

Putting that aside, I will shamelessly suck good info from this thread (actually I already started) . Subscribed!

This is a boat load of information for beginners that are serious, you guys are lucky to be getting this so take notes and review this thread thoroughly.

Thanks for posting your progress and notes for all, this is what everyone should do but I guess if they don't have the time.

Out of those 100 girls you wanted to model did Haruko of FLCL happen to be in there?

Just wondering

And so the adventure begins! I'm curious on how the hair is going to come out as it looks like it will be the hardest to get right.

And so it begins, sub'd!

wow Thanks again for sharing your process man.

This is going to be interesting

Can't wait to see how you pull off the face.
subscribed

Man I love Miku, and with you doing it this can't fail!

Can't wait to see the awesomeness unfold.

Originally Posted by Del

Seriously though, this sounds awesome. I can't wait to see it.

Can't wait to see what happens with this man. Super excited for some learning.

shit yes...subscribed

Free teachings from an amazing artist? Yes...yes I think I will subscribe to this.

So glad you went with Miku!

Would love to see how this unfolds. Is this going to be a fully rigged complete game asset? If so are you going to append cloth physics onto the hair, animated and make it functional in a game engine, or is the whole thing going to be a static sculpture? Because her hair by itself can constitute an entire Art Nouveau piece if you want it to :P

Sweet, it's gonna be great following this.

Wow, those are some real child-bearing hips on the one in the second row with the binary code background.

Looks like a good character to go with. She's simple and iconic enough for you to play a lot with the proportions and still have her be recognisable. Rigging and animating her hair might be an interesting experience.

This is the character they did the holographic J-pop concert with, wasn't it?

I think it's pretty awesome you're going to stare your weaknesses in the face and do something way out of your comfort zone. Definitely going to keep an eye on this one!

That hair is crazy. Can't wait to see how you go with this.

Sweet! Gonna be eagerly awaiting each update

Miku!? This is going to be great! Watching this thread intensively.