Petrol/Blood - Toby Rutter/Gavin Li
polycounter lvl 7
Woop woop finally taking part in a Polycount contest. Gavin and I are designing a bio mechanical amphibious creature and pilot/mechanic. We'll be posting some reference images and early concepts in a bit
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It'll become pretty clear which of these images where drawn by Gav and which ones are mine. I started out trying to generate some different costume concepts for our pilot character. Most of them are pretty generic but everyone now and again I would find some small detail I liked.
Meanwhile Gav has been doing some sketches of the creature/vehicle based of the silhouette we thought would be the most interesting to work with. We're trying to balance a lot of cool aquatic details with a more amphibious body structure.
I wanted to test the logistics of how the pilots cockpit would be augmented into the creatures body, and see what kind of pose the pilot would have to be to fit inside of it. I was trying to keep it more realistic rather than just relying on loads of clipping to make it possible
Here's another shot of the seat, at this point I was starting to mess around with different shapes for the back of the seat.
Initially we thought the pilot was going to be a mid 20's female but as we started to come up with ideas we decided to make her a younger teenage girl taking some inspiration from books like Enders Game, various other dysptopian fiction (like chaos walking) and battle royal and settled on a younger intelligent character who is competing in these death matches using her ability to cereberally controlher creature.
As a result I had to reproportion my model to make it look younger.
I find it easy to iterate through ideas in 3D so I started to build off my base mesh and model the outfit. I'm trying to create lots of layered materials in a close fitting wet suit style costume.
This post has probably gone on long enough
Next job will be making the silhouette a bit more interesting. Since I changed the proportions to make the character look younger I've lose some of the dynamic lines that came from the characters curves.
@Safemilk Thanks a lot that's really encouraging. You're entries looking killer btw, I really I like the references you've got the shape of your vehicle.
@Mike8917 I'm glad you like the head, I really wanted to make the hammerhead style augs work but I nothing I tried was as strong as the shape of the head underneath so I decided to scrap it and keep going with what was looking better.
I want the underside to be more smooth and leather-y whilst the hide will be more scaley. I tried a very circular scale pattern similar to an iguana but didn't like it as much as a more rocky inspired scale pattern I tried on the rear leg. I still want to balance it ab it so you don't lose much of the underlying forms when adding all this surface detail, I also want to ensure that the design doesn't get too noisey.
Gav and I sat down on Wednesday evening to go over the shape of the cockpit section of the creature I had sculpted some blockouts but wasn't really feeling any of the shapes yet they lacked cohesion and didn't feel very designed. Gav came up with a shape that was a lot sleeker and feel felt more in fitting with the design.
It's currently one large piece and will be broken down with some panel cut lines and small details to make it less blocky, but I prefer the overall shape to what we had before. I'll probably take it into maya shortly to establish the mechanism for how it'll open and close.