Cyber Monk - Semester Long Quake 4 Project

animeboyz

This thread is my Off shoot from the Custom Quake 4 Models thread. I felt that I was somewhat HIjacking the thread, so I simply created this thread.

The basic Premise, is a friend and I are in the same animation class and both want to get into the Game Industry. We both are a little behind with our portfolios, so to help flesh it out, we wanted to create characters.

Part of the assigment is getting involved in this community and gaining Critiques and Criticism from a community who is familure with this media. (as decided by me, because our teacher made us write our own Sylibus)

Original Concept (Year old drawings, what I was stemming from.)



So After consulting my teacher, I am now adding more drapery. My teacher suggested I try thinking in opposites. What's the common theme in Quake 4 in the sense of design.

So, I thought,"Ok, Everythings skin tight. So I added some flowing drapery (which is going to be a bitch to anime :-( ) But, you guys suggest I should make sure the character fits in the Quake Universe so we got some of the robotic elements.

So I guess, thinking about this as re-working of a character, this could be Xaero, after he gets defeated in Quake 3

The character is supposed to look somewhat emaciated, I watched the Machinist friday night and got some ideas on drawing skinny asss people, I still need to find some photo reference on the stomach. I also plan on stretching the mechanical legs a bit to make him look more bird-like.

Rough rough


Semi-Rough


Head


Please Critique the shit out of this, (Make me cry like a bitch with a skinned knee) I don't want to start modeling untill I have a refined character.

gauss

well for starters i think you can give us a drawing of all the elements you're considering here--the different head, body, legs, etc.--all in one drawing. that'd help.

past the preliminary concern of having to mentally piece together two or three drawings, i think you're really going to have to suss out what you want to do with this character. is he Xaero, or isn't he? are you going straight tabula rasa or is the model supposed to fit in with the rest of the Q4 characters stylistically?

even if you aren't going with remaking Xaero, i think your concepts will get a boost from a little more than just cursory research and reference. for instance: Xaero's outfit is roughly modeled on that of a Buddhist monk, with the characteristic orange shoulder-sash arrangement. if you're going to remake Xaero, you probably ought to consider a similar costume derivation. your sketches really don't indicate anything like that beyond the draping waistcloth, and that's pretty generic.

how about the prosthetics? again, supposing this is to be Xaero, and even if it isn't: what purpose do they serve? why are all these abstract mechanical bits grafted onto his person? if you're following Q3 "lore," thin as it may be, every arena fighter is automagically reconstituted every time they die, even if they lose. so why would Xaero need to get mecha-bits?

spend some time looking at the Xaero character design. notice how well the elements balance visually--the right shoulder is draped with cloth, while the left shoulder has the mechanical shootie-arm thing. Xaero already has some implants, but they're fairly subtle.

if you're really looking to create a strong, memorable character design, not only do you need to consider thematic, historical elements, but you really ought to start back with a silhouette. the Quake 3 character designs are especially good in this respect--virtually every character can be readily identified from their silhouette alone (skin-only variations notwithstanding of course). so do some thumbnails of all-black silhouettes, to give the character a unique and visually appealing shape.

whether or not it's Xaero, what's the deal with the proboscis style trunk on the head design? what possible reason would a character have for that sort of thing?

don't you dare think of answering "because it looks cool." yes, that might be the reason why you happen upon the design in the first place, but good designs are as coherent as possible, on all levels. you may never have to explain what each little cyborg bit on your character does, but if you CAN then the character is that much better for it, because you've considered function fully.

above all i think the important word for character creation is not realism (since not all characters ought to be realistic), but believability. in the world that he/she/it inhabits, does the character make sense? is it a visually and thematically coherent construction, does it look like it's lived a life up until this point? the best characters do not seem conjured from the ether... it seems more that they were there all along, with the artist in question merely having discovered them and documented them for others to see

you've got some good preliminary stuff, but you're about 10% of the way there. if you want a good character by the time you start modeling, keep filling up your sketchbook with drawings of this guy.

Steve Schulze

I really like the mosquito helmet. You can always make up a reason for it. Perhaps its like Kurt's helmet in MDK and encorporates a fancy sniper scope. That said though, if you're modernising Xaero it may not be an ideal choice unless you can think of a logical way to encorporate it into his background

One of thing you might like to consider is the flagellant prostheses that Xaero has grafted to his back - it punishes him when he messes up. Now this being Quake 4 he will have already been defeated so perhaps he will have built up the flagellant device as an extra insentive to never allow himself to be defeated again.

Zatoichi

I think the helmet should be apart of a unique character of your own. Even for me, it goes waaaaay beyond an update of an original character from Quake. Looks more like something out of "The 5th Element".
Like gauss said, you should flesh out every part of him. The back pack, hardware, cloathing, etc... I like the first sketch showing some absolutely enormous thing on his back. quite interesting... almost reminds me of the Jackie Chan films where he is being taught by monks and has to do outrageous things to pass a test like carry heavy objects. Or maybe like the Monkey King fable. Whatever the case, I thing you are on to something there. If you look at this artist http://hyung-taekim.org/index.php he is always putting gigantic things on his chicks (and i dont mean what you are thinking *wink*) ,like containers/lanterns/machinery , that have kanji on them.
EDIT: oops... that website dosnt have any good examples. I do have an art book that does, but that wont help you.