Week 9 - Character Artistic block

This week was a slow starter; the weekend was spent overcoming the artistic block mentioned in the previous post. But it was time well spent in terms of self reflection, i soon realised that the feedback given wasn’t so negative. I took most of what was said and re-evaluated my work against it, I soon realised how flawed the design was right through to the initial sketches.  I took a handful of the silhouettes from the start of the project and went in a different direction with them. Instead of focussing on what i wanted the final outcome to be, instead i looked at the shapes i was forming and how the shapes related to each other. I experimented quite a bit with this, not rushing in to anything, I soon settled on one of the characters designs I just had to come up with an interesting design to go with it.

The design of the second character was awkward, it took quite a while trudging through various silhouettes and finding something that matched the other character. Anything I came up with that fitted with the other character, was also in itself quite non-descript.  So when deciding on which design to further I really had to think about what the silhouette really was and how it functioned in the world.

To do so I did lots of research in to the way animals worked and their internals, I realised that the silhouettes I liked were all quite animal like and resembled bear or ape type animals. This proved difficult, no matter what I really did with the silhouette it always lost what made it interesting, its mysterious nature.  So I decided to leave it for a little while and work in to the design of the other character as I was quite certain that i would model that one. I started drawing over the top of the silhouette, the character soon turned in to quite a young girl in a large coat that filled the rest of the silhouette. I soon iterated on this and the character eventually started to change to a more Eskimo like design.  At this point I knew the character was going to be a young girl, so i started a base mesh in max. I started with the face; I used a slightly older face for reference with the intention of making it look younger and slightly stylized at a later date.  

There is not a lot of time left on this project and I’m quite worried about it, I need to finalize the design, finish the base mesh, unwrap the model, texture it and hopefully rig the model. So not too much, you know?