The Beast: The Winged Watcher
polycounter lvl 7
In the spirit of all the New Year new you rubbish I'm going to endeavour to actually finish a bit of work I for a Polycount competition (my track record thus far has been awful), and also to just generally be more active on here. I've not finalised the written description of my character but the jist is something like this:
Adam is a young man from a race of winged humanoids. He becomes separated from his people and captured by malicious scientist who is fascinated by his physiology. Adam is kept captive, hidden from the world for years being experimented on until a fire breaks enabling his escape. During the course of his escape he is badly burnt, and it is only once he is free that he realises he is alone in the city. Separated by his disfiguring injuries and his race he flees high up into the gothic architecture of the city, watching the world he will never be a part of beneath him.
The characters background takes elements from the stories of Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frankenstein and Phantom of the Opera.
This was an initial proportion blockout along with some blockout of the wings skeletal structure based on some bird wing reference.
Adam is a young man from a race of winged humanoids. He becomes separated from his people and captured by malicious scientist who is fascinated by his physiology. Adam is kept captive, hidden from the world for years being experimented on until a fire breaks enabling his escape. During the course of his escape he is badly burnt, and it is only once he is free that he realises he is alone in the city. Separated by his disfiguring injuries and his race he flees high up into the gothic architecture of the city, watching the world he will never be a part of beneath him.
The characters background takes elements from the stories of Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frankenstein and Phantom of the Opera.
This was an initial proportion blockout along with some blockout of the wings skeletal structure based on some bird wing reference.
Replies
The second problem with the character was that he looks a too much like an angel which isn't really the direction I want, there are a couple of things I can do to fix this, an obvious one is texture the wings in a more bird like colour scheme. The second is to using bird anatomy as the basis for the characters feet and generally bring as many bird features in as I can. My final aim was to adjust the position and anatomy of the wings to make it more "accurate" to bird physiology.
I spent a fair bit of time using paint overs to explore possible directions I could take, and to just think more about the character. Given that I wanted his clothing to be scavenged my first ideas focused on patchwork cobbled together costumes. Unfortunately they didn't really gel with me I didn't imagine the character would be spending a lot of time stitching together bits of material, and also finding half of a waistcoat felt a bit arbitrary.
The around in my early designs I tried out different designs that focus on bandages covering up different regions of the body, both for his injuries and also to cover himself. I think this is a good direction for the costume although it still feels a bit sparse. Concealing his appearance is something that I feel is very important for the character.
The last direction I tried was incorporating a cowl made out loose material into the design. Something that could achieve a high collar to obscure his face without completely covering up the scaring. Earlier I tried some designs using venetian style/phantom masks but the fact that it covered up the key detail of his face was a huge issue. The other element I like of this design is the collection of small shiny pins/broaches he's scavenged and attached to the cowl, it gives a bit of magpie character always looking for shiny pretty things which he find beautiful.
The next step will be to block out the cowl before taking another look at the overall design before progressing.
I'm pretty satisfied with how the major forms are looking so I decided to bite the bullet and retopo the characters body so I can get subdivision levels and make the model a bit easier to work on at higher resolution. Normally I'm pretty lazy and just use zremesher but this time I decided to do it manually as it would give me a base for my eventual low res mesh.
Next I really need to stop avoiding doing work on the wings and bring them up to the same level as the rest of the model
And yeh, I almost certainly will be doing a beast, but have to get my monster slayer character done first so wont be able to start it for another few weeks. Keep up the good work