Sketchbook: Leanne Reed
Hello!
I’m a Games Art student with a big, ongoing character design brief that I would love to show and get some critique on!
My brief was to design, concept and create both in traditional 3D and digital 3D a concept based on myself but from a completely different cultural background. After some internet research research I found a BBC article about one of the worlds only female eagle hunter apprentice in Mongolia http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26969150 and thought this would be an interesting, fairly unknown culture to base my character.
To further this I wanted my character to be a different age from myself, and as some of my previous character work featured much older ladies I chose to mirror the real life inspiration and make my character a young girl of about 13.
I really struggled with the initial silhouette phase with this project, I did a lot of stylistic research across the internet and collated it onto a Pinterest board, http://www.pinterest.com/leanneagram/culture-character-design/ so I already had a fairly good idea of the clothing I wanted my character to have, and being a 13 year old girl I felt a bit limited by body type (other than thin/chubby, not heroic or too tall which might suggest a much older character), the only thing I wasn’t sure about was giving my character the tradition Mongolian wage hunter’s fur hat, which I decided much later with the mock-up/photo bash designs.
When feeling stuck in the silhouette stage I did a few rough water colour sketches to see if I liked where the character was going, looking back these were before too much research into 13year old’s proportions and look way off!
Photo bashing was a new technique to me but I really liked how quickly it allowed me to mock up the character and see how it might turn out before spending a lot of time digital painting, it was a life saver! It was at this photo bashing stage that I realised that even though I wanted to have my character without a hat to more easily show her gender and age that the traditional style hat just worked so much better. I even feel that this change helped her look younger with this massive furry hood, and also made more sense when in the context of hunting in Mongolia.
I knew I wanted a very powerful, dramatic falconry pose to juxtapose the fact the character is a small girl. And messed around with a few falconry inspired dynamic poses, taking extra care that as this will be a 3D model (both digital and not) that I wanted the pose to work from as many angles as possible.
I felt very attached to the original colour of the padded tunic, but decided to do other colour ways to see if anything jumped out at me, but still ended up choosing the original ‘ice blue’ colour of the tunic that will look nice next to the dark reddish browns of the eagle.
Final Turn Around and Pose
I would love to her what everyone thought, really looking for some critique, especially going into the 3D Topolgy!
I’m a Games Art student with a big, ongoing character design brief that I would love to show and get some critique on!
My brief was to design, concept and create both in traditional 3D and digital 3D a concept based on myself but from a completely different cultural background. After some internet research research I found a BBC article about one of the worlds only female eagle hunter apprentice in Mongolia http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26969150 and thought this would be an interesting, fairly unknown culture to base my character.
To further this I wanted my character to be a different age from myself, and as some of my previous character work featured much older ladies I chose to mirror the real life inspiration and make my character a young girl of about 13.
I really struggled with the initial silhouette phase with this project, I did a lot of stylistic research across the internet and collated it onto a Pinterest board, http://www.pinterest.com/leanneagram/culture-character-design/ so I already had a fairly good idea of the clothing I wanted my character to have, and being a 13 year old girl I felt a bit limited by body type (other than thin/chubby, not heroic or too tall which might suggest a much older character), the only thing I wasn’t sure about was giving my character the tradition Mongolian wage hunter’s fur hat, which I decided much later with the mock-up/photo bash designs.
When feeling stuck in the silhouette stage I did a few rough water colour sketches to see if I liked where the character was going, looking back these were before too much research into 13year old’s proportions and look way off!
Photo bashing was a new technique to me but I really liked how quickly it allowed me to mock up the character and see how it might turn out before spending a lot of time digital painting, it was a life saver! It was at this photo bashing stage that I realised that even though I wanted to have my character without a hat to more easily show her gender and age that the traditional style hat just worked so much better. I even feel that this change helped her look younger with this massive furry hood, and also made more sense when in the context of hunting in Mongolia.
I knew I wanted a very powerful, dramatic falconry pose to juxtapose the fact the character is a small girl. And messed around with a few falconry inspired dynamic poses, taking extra care that as this will be a 3D model (both digital and not) that I wanted the pose to work from as many angles as possible.
I felt very attached to the original colour of the padded tunic, but decided to do other colour ways to see if anything jumped out at me, but still ended up choosing the original ‘ice blue’ colour of the tunic that will look nice next to the dark reddish browns of the eagle.
Final Turn Around and Pose
I would love to her what everyone thought, really looking for some critique, especially going into the 3D Topolgy!
Replies
Despite struggling I was really please with my low poly face, I felt it was a good representation of the reference image I used and despite keeping it very low poly initially it looked quite round and had depth to it. Later I add more polys and loops for ease in mudbox, and also cutting the top of the head off where the hat will cover it.
Following a tutorial I made a basic body, adjusted the proportions and began pulling the form outwards to build the clothing instead of building separate clothes and placing them on top as this would be an unnecessary use of polys.
The hat was probably the hardest part of the whole model, it took a few attempts to get a shape similar to that of my reference images. This is where my skills in 3Ds Max really lacked finesse compared to sculpting in real clay I wasn't able to achieve the fullness of the hat compared to my reference images and my clay build. But instead of fussing over it for hours I thought it might be easily to mess with in mudbox rather that max.
I was pleased with my final max build after more tinkering with the height/proportions and relaxing the clothes slightly and was ready to jump into mudbox. At this point i was really unsure of mudbox's capabilities as I had only played around with simple objects within the program.
After a short while messing around in mudbox and watching a few youtube videos. This one showing the making of a leather jacket really helped, [ame]
I was really surprised with how quickly the sculting in mudbox made such a massive difference to my model, going no higher than level 5 which gave more than enough detailing for my model.
For areas of the highest detail, like the leather on the gloves, I found textures online and used them as stencils for both sculpting the details and texturing the colour using the projection tool.
Following the same techniques of making stencils and using them for sculpting then texturing a quickly added a lot more to the model in a relatively short time.
The head was much trickier, using a couple of high res pictures of my own face I used that as the projection for the texture, carefully moving the stencil around to ensure an even skin tone around the face, even where the stencil ended, and making sure that even though the stencil of my adult face didn't match the proportions of my model I moved and adjusted my stencil accordingly.
And as a finishing touch on a new paint layer I added dirt splatters and mud along the bottom of the tunic, edge of the sleeves, trousers and across the boots and areas of general wear.
I think this whole project has taught me a lot about all the processes that go into character creation and I found all steps really interesting but during this project time management was definitely my downfall. Having leant now how powerful mudbox can be and how much you are able to edit your models I would have spent less time on the base model and allowed a lot more time to mess around and play in mudbox, and my model really suffered as a result of realising this too late. But I do think for future portfolio pieces I am in a much better position to use mudbox and potentially make good quality characters to show off. But I definitely much prefer all the preproduction art work over the digital character creation and feel that my clay character model was of a much, much high quality than that of a my mudbox sculpt.
Hight poly turnaround gif: