Week 16 - Rustlemania

christopheranka
Jan 21, 2016
6 min read

So whereas last week wasn’t really much of a productive week, this week has been the complete opposite albeit for what I think now cold be the wrong reasons. This week was more of a forced crunch time as in this week’s game production we received the game production brief which as it turns out illustrates we don’t have that much time on this project to my disappointment.

I felt that ultimately all this time prepping for what I wanted to be my magnum opus of a project has been a bit of a waste due to time constraints. If we had longer on this project I really would have enjoyed spending more time balancing research, design and also sharpening skills in z brush but it does not seem like this will be likely due to the amount of time given to us. It’s a shame but you have to deal with the cards you have been given. This does mean however that I feel on the design side of things I have been rushing this week to allow me to move on to the 3d side of things. Speaking of the 3d side of things, in this week’s game production we were introduced to a lesson on z spheres which once again I am so thankful that I spent time prior working with z brush and z spheres. Z brushs' learning curve is becoming much clearer to me every time I use it. It’s become very clear that this is a software which one can learn its interface and tools like Photoshop, but to become proficient in it takes a lot of time and experience. Something we just don’t have available to us during this project

This is why strong orthographics are important. The ones these were modelled off of suffered from a weird balaancing issue particularly from the side view

During the lesson, I didn’t so much struggle using them but the outcome I created was not pretty. In fact the outcome seemed more like a downgrade to my first year character model. If this is consistently the case I feel like I have two options to pursue. The first one being to model a base mesh in 3ds max however after weeks of writing this constantly I guess it’s clear; I am not the biggest fan of modelling in max. The second option would be to take a plunge and work in z brush which I enjoy but I am not yet at the stage of competently producing something decent yet. If I want to take the second option then I need to spend this weekend making a few throwaway base models via z spheres to get used to creating manikins for the next week. It won’t be easy but in the long run I think it would be much more beneficial, if Z brush is in fact the software which I want to be part of my craft.

On a more positive note, as well as studying Z spheres I took the time to get more acquainted with the Transpose tool in Z brush. It’s getting easier which mean I'm one step closer to being able to use the Grassetti style of sculpting which Is a huge victory in my personal progression of learning Z brush.

Sculpts by Rafael Grassetti

Anyway this week’s visual studies was a very refreshing an interesting change for the course. There were two lessons on offer based on design for stylised characters and the other based on design for realistic characters. Both of which were a treat and I just wished we had more lessons like these. They really did feel like art lessons which are always welcome and always enjoyable. In the lesson about stylisation we took a look at analysing the body and its muscle groups and abstracting them as part of a stylised design. Moreover we took a look at ways to improve designs via additions of accented colour and a more efficient way of creating iterative colour palletes for our designs. Honestly this was one of my favourite and enjoyable sessions in the year. I even took the time to receive feedback on my life drawing and work.

If I’m going on about how much I enjoyed this session it’s because I really really enjoyed this weeks visual studies and gained a lot from it.

Feedback from my tutor included:

locking down the feet more with a defined sharp/stroke.
Using fewer lines in life drawing and spend more time to study the body.
Think about the spine more and look up more about human movement and its limitations.

When my tutor mentioned studying the spine I remembered during my days of collecting art books I came across a book for animators which deals with the human bodies movement and dynamism. Turns out I’ve been sitting on a gold mine for a long time and I didn’t know.

After attending the first session on stylisation I decided to sit the realism session to view the photobashing demonstration. However I was so bogged down with getting my designs ready for 3d that I didn’t spend enough time watching the demonstration.

Luckily the session has been uploaded to blackboard to which I will make time to watch.

So the plan is to make a bunch of base sculpts via z spheres, find time to watch this, finish my designs, sculpt model and texture a character and finally remember to water my plants, in about 2 weeks. I'm sure I can do this right...

Looking back I’ve said it again but this week’s visual studies was a very welcome, enjoyable and beneficial session. One that I feel I haven’t experienced on the course for a long time now. I’ve grown to become used to having to study and learn in my own time however when it is part of a tutor lead session it has been very useful for a more directed sort of learning and for once it was nice to have a very artistic environment rather than say the normal marketing side of things that has been a recent occurrence on the course lately. I really would be excited to see more of these types of sessions in the future but realistically time and the type of projects we are given I doubt this will be likely.

So those designs I was raving on about earlier. Here they are attached in the slide below.

Continuing with the theme of a wrestler and its manager, this week was spent sketching on random post it notes, creating large mood boards dumped full of reference images as well as seeking feedback a lot. This process is much more enjoyable as I may have written out to be and I am quite excited for my designs this time playing around with the idea that the smaller manager character is a sort of villain type character and attempting to illustrate this in their design by featuring sharper shapes and less flattering features like a black eye to illustrate them looking rough and tougher than the bigger character.

As you see in my designs to further illustrate the duality between the two I have also gone down the route to exploring the use of a fake moustache on the second character to convey both characters visual similarities as well as hint there backstory of their obsession with this Great Gama wrestler by taking one of the Great Gama’s identifiable features i.e. his eccentric moustache and applying it onto my characters. As you may see in the slide there is a somewhat unrelated study of an arm. This was to prepare myself for some of the more detailed design stages of the characters i.e. Thinking about what type of materials their costume will have and learning how to easily communicate and render this for viewers. That said to be awfully critical of myself although I am somewhat happy with the designs silhouette but the internal details like I said earlier I just wish there was more time. Areas of my design I really would like to explore are the patterns on the characters cloth as well as the design on the characters belt to really blend the whole eastern culture meets flashy wrestling tropes and styles. But with the time given I feel like these special details may need to be missed in order to meet the deadline. However what’s to stop me from going back to this project and refining it the way I want with no time constraints and all the freedom to really get into the meat of the design with its symbolism and more nuanced ideas.

I really do wish to do such as this but for a project which I feel already feels slightly ambitious with the layers of research I could undertake it seems that I may have to do a simplified version of these characters for the project.

It’s a shame but a deadline is a deadline. Anyway this has been week 16, hopefully by week 17 I should have a 3d base of my character to present.