Extremely condensed design process
I have two weeks to design two characters and then model and
texture one character. Normal I try and split projects into three groups
Designing, modelling, and texturing. This gives me under 5 days to design two
characters.
Random Shapes
Here I tried to simply drop random dichotomous groups of
shapes with the intension of creating characters. I tried not to delve into the
who, what, when where of the characters, but found this extremely difficult. I
found that I had to give my characters purpose, a world, story, character.
Although the ideas I came up with were extremely simply, they did exists, so I
failed at the first hurdle here. These ideas though are not set in concrete;
they were constantly changing throughout this process.
I found this generally extremely unsuccessful, but it was
fun and interesting to see what I could come up with such limited ref.
Mood
Board
I decided at this point that the basic shapes that I had
been using were to limiting. The design looks quite insect like so I went onto
pinterest and started searching for interesting ref.
The small moth, fly like insect on this board with the
elaborate head dresses are called Tree Hoppers and they are amazing.
I used the quick selection tool in Photoshop to grab random
silhouettes from the insects. I then started simply mashing these with the best
of my previous silhouettes. I was really
pleased with the way this was going.
Further Development
Here I had kind of settled
on an idea, I wonted this giant alien to be obviously evil and dangerous. I
also wanted to create a relationship reminiscent of the one below involving both my
characters.
(The Iron Giant)
So a giant powerful, alien evil character, and a venerable,
relatable, small, insignificant other character.
This
meant creating natural, alien forms that would read as weapons, ranged weapons
at that, but without jumping to guns. They would have to be natural in form,
but still read as a source of power although there is very little in nature
like this.
At which point does a character become so alien that it’s
not a character anymore? Because of this
thought I briefly tried to make the main body of the alien more skull like,
using the elephant skull as reference. I decided that if the single hole at the
front of the alien was an eye with a pupil, then this would be viewed as a
living, creature.
