Week 17- Its coming together?

Note to self the serratus needs to be toned down

Aww yes. It’s not perfect. It’s not pretty but it’s a start and an enjoyable one. This week was going full steam with the modelling side of things in Z brush which at first I was quite fearful of however it seems that all that prep over the course paid off as when modelling its started to feel natural to me. For first time I even found myself desperate to go back to 3D instead of working on my 2D concepts. I’ve never been so excited about working to produce a 3d outcome since well never actually during the time on my course. 3D has always been so very technical and in my personal opinion took away from the gratification of experimentation and creativity I would find in concepting. Although I am not concepting when sculpting, technical worries such as working out how I attach x vert and moving verts laboriously were not apparent and I could just get stuck into the meat of things when developing my asset. I’ve enjoyed using Z brush this week and studying techniques from Rafael Grassetti’s Gumroad that I’m really adamant that I want to continue using this software and developing characters.

zSPEHRES

Front

Side

perspective

Back

Development so far

I really do hope that I can adopt a workflow to concept characters in 2d and see them through to 3d and engine as a norm in the future. Seriously this stuff is insanely fun.

During my time with Z brush this week I also found a board on Polycount detailing the entrants of a past competition for character designs and sculpts of a fighting game theme. The work on this board is utterly amazing and inspiring as a student. It’s kind of given me a strong idea as to what I would ideally like the outcome of my character to look like.

Source: Vidar Rapp - Senior Character Artist (If my character can just get even one hint of this look Ill say that this project was a success)

This project and has really been enjoyable, I’m hoping that I can keep this steam going on because at this rate I think I may have found the area I would like to go into for the future which is to be a character artist. For the first time really I feel like there is a place for me in the games industry to really pursue rather than my older goals which was to essentially become a stronger artist. If this is in fact the area I would like to pursue then I really got to kick up my game.

In terms of formal lessons this week wasn’t as say formally structured as last week. In Visual studies we were allowed simply to carry on with our craft to which I took the time to study the Grassetti Gumroads which have been a blessing. They’ve made sculpting much more of a consumable and realistic idea and have taken away that feeling of not knowing what to do with such an alien software. Now if only there is a clothing tutorial I could find with would help me in such a way.

Applying clothing to a Z brush sculpt is something that both worries and intimidates me as quite frankly I have no clue how I will approach this. I have a vague idea but it’s not really grounded or efficient for the time we have left. I think this was one of my personal problems with this week which was instead of studying how to work with clothing in Z brush we were given a demonstration of their personal workflows in Z brush as well as learning Retopoplgy. This lesson was just as valuable as learning clothing however I do feel like having a sort of foundation to go on when dealing with clothing and Z brush would have been nice. Well you can’t have everything given to you. Guess I need to do some research into this. I just hope it doesn’t kill the steam what I have been experiencing with this project so far.

Colour_Iterations

Orthos

Heads

Head_ORTHO

In terms of 2d progression this week has been more 3D focus however this didn’t halt my progression. As you can see above I started experimenting with colour palette as well as producing a rough orthographic for my sculpt and being in the process of developing the head orthographic for my base mesh. Two concerns about colour I would like to express in this post. Firstly it seems although I may feel like I can render using colour making palette is a bit of a struggle which leads onto my second concern which is the brief says that characters must be human however going with a stylised look I’ve made it so that my character has vibrant pink skin/bodypaint and possibly clear contact lenses. I have asked my game production tutors if this is acceptable which so far it has been approved however I have yet to ask visual studies formally. Hopefully this will be accepted as I am really keen on the 24th colour iteration I produced. Speaking of in game production this week linking to my concern about my ability with colour palette I received feedback for. On the larger wrestler they seemed to be more of a success among audiences than the palette on the smaller character. The main concern was that the smaller character would feel noisy when scaled to its exact proportions. Taking on this criticism I am working to refine the design which you may see in the heads iteration page as I take away some of the accented colours and darken the value of the legs allowing the viewer to anchor towards the head of the character rather than the face.

Hopefully I can find time to refine these characters design but as the deadline keeps looming I really do fear that my preferred vision of this project won’t come into fruition.

One small success though like I planned last week I did manage to find some time playing around with Z spheres over the weekend producing two quick hands. This you might say came in handy for this week’s modelling right?

Anyway goals for this weekend/next week - Get the head done, and study how to making good clothing for a Z brush Sculpt