Week 17 - Character Project Preparation & Life Drawing

Reference and Moodboard

In preparation for my upcoming project I have began collecting various forms of photographic reference. Some presenting, people around me like my friends; while other showing different types of clothing and accessories. This is more of a visual library for me, one that I can return to later, especially when I get stuck or need to think up of more ideas. I plan to check through all the images and photographs to then decide on those most useful to me. I can then put them together into a usable moodboard  to use for the Character Project. Apart from this I will later on need to look for already existing paintings, art pieces and images which I could use for a Colour Reference Board. I hope for this to help me decide on more appropriate colour schemes and styles for my character ideas. 

One character idea I was thinking about was the blacksmith, but I have designed a blacksmith house in a past project, so this time I was hoping to focus on something else. Then I came across the idea of a witch character which was very interesting, but I still prefered something less fantasy like. Eventually I decided on designing a butcher. I found this to be the best character for me to try and design at this time, if anything goes wrong I can always go back and try making a different one.

Some of the photographs I collected of members of a Viking Re-Enactment Society. I was really interested in some of the hairstyles shown on the photos. Their weapons, clothing (some of which is authentic) and accessories such as belts are a great source of inspiration which I can use within my design process. The last photograph shows my friend holding up one of the shields with really nice decorating and patterns. There are tens of other photographs which I've collected myself, but unfortunately there's too many to post on the blog and so I've decided to pick a few interesting ones that I could share here.

My Face Topology (My friends called it Topor-ology)

As the character I'll be designing will be based on my appearance/body, I started to prepare some photographs of my body and face. As shown on the photographs above, I made sure they allign as accurately as possible with eachother when I took them (there were many attmepts). This ensured that my following steps were easier. The following task was to draw a rough topology of my face on top of these photographs. I've made sure to have a shadow casting on either side of my face; this enabled me to see the various bumps and depth changes in my face. I drew the coloured loops on the left image first to get a rough idea where certain edges should be placed and where the could connect. After I have placed most of the lines down and marked where they connect, I moved onto the other image. I then drew grey horizontal lines across the images to transfer and redraw the topology on the right photograph.

Week 16 - Modelling A Female Head & Life Drawing

Modelling A Female Head

Following on from the female body model, it was time for me to practice making a female head. I used the provided reference drawings for the head, which shown views from various angles such as the front and side. I just needed to make the most of these when modelling it, so that this head made sense and looked fairly believable from different angles.

I've encountered problem in the most crucial stages of modelling, like when describing all the small indentations and bumps in the head (eye sockets, mouth etc). It was very easy to make these wrong. I've spent a fair amount of time on just adjusting verts and edges in those areas.

Another thing I learned here was that compared to the rest of the body, the head is usually more detailed in games. My head model had a larger triangle count for it's size, compared to its body. This additional detail level would allow the character to portray more detailed facial animations and emotions.

Surprisingly, I needed to spend a lot more time on the head than I originally thought. I guess this was due to my inexperience and lack of knowledge in this area of modelling at the time. I am still not fully satisfied with the end result. I aim to become faster in these areas by spending more time on practice of modelling of natural/organic shapes in 3DS Max.

Aside from the model, I have done some comparing of game characters. It was to see how crucial the head-to-body ratio was for a characters appearance adn silhouette. A character like Nathan Drake was roughly 7.5 heads, it gives him that extra bit of realism and makes him look natural/real. The Medic from Team Fortress 2  though has a higher ratio of roughly 9 heads which in turn makes him more stylised and less realistic. He almost looks heroic with his chunky and enlarged body parts.

Life Drawing

This week I was again badly timing my sketching, but it has still improved on my previous week's work as most of the sketches were almost completed this time. I really liked how the "not looking"warm up sketch turned out, I felt that I managed to describe the model better than I thought I could, when not looking at my paper/sketchbook. There was a mistkae on the final drawing, I dre the head too close to the left as I measured incorrectly  so I needed to redraw it later. I didn't want to fix this area straight away, as I may have been dragged into it for too long and could have ended not drawing the rest of the body. I drew most of the body first and when I have a few seconds left at the end, I moved back to the head to try and draw a suggestion of it further to the right.

Week 15 - Modelling A Female Body, Anatomy Studies & Life Drawing

Modeling a Female Body

This model has caused me a few initial probelms though. One being that I needed to model an organic shape (a body) using front, side and back reference planes. These drawings did not allign crrectly from all angles, so I neded to some more thinking in order to get the model to look right in these areas. I've spent a while looking back throught my life drawings and also researching online for anotomical sources. This was to help me figure out how some areas not shown on the reference drawings, should look like, especially on the inside sides of arms and legs. The reference drawings did not describe the shape of these areas well.

Above are some rendered views of my finished low poly female body model. Just to add, the head for this model was provided and my task was to make a body using supplied concept drawings to fit in with it. I think I managed to get it correct, as the body doesn't look out of proportion and also it stands fairly straight so its pose seems balanced enough.

I was satisfied with my model, as I have managed to get it to look very similar to its reference. It meant to me that I was able to fairly well visualise and make a model from someone's idea/work. It's a useful skill in group projects, where I may need to be able to understand and work from ideas made by another person/team member.

As additional practice, I decide to work on a few paintovers of this model. It was just a way of practicing how I could maybe design some form of clothing for it, to then model onto it later. I've spent some time on it, but clearly not enough, as I only ended up wth 2 outcomes. I was aiming for a military theme here. I think it would be a good idea to work on more of these in my character project, as it may be an area in which I'll struggle since it's fairly new to me.

In my spare time, I have been taking pictures of some of my friends and one here is also of myself. I then practiced drawing the body structure on top of these images in grey. From that I tried to reconstruct these by painting the structure below the photos and painting in the different geometric shapes making up their bodies. I felt that this partly enabled me to understand how the mass of a person's body behaves/moves in 3 dimensional space, especially how our bodies appear forshortened when standing in sharper angels from our eye.

Life Drawing

The warm up sketches went well for me, although I din't finish the 2nd one in time, but it was a tighter and more difficult pose to draw what impacted my timing. The following drawing was going well, until I got the the strongly foreshortened pose in the 2nd one. I made a mistake when measuring and the thigs ended up looking too thick and long. This unfortunately caused the upper body to appear too small and out of place. With that mentality, I moved onto the last drawing where I spent extra time measuring, to prevent that mistake, but again that cost me some time and my model was missing her legs on this one. I was really satisfied with the last drawing though. This learning curve has gotten me to this stage and my last outcome ended up looking most accurate to me. The definition of the stomach and shoulders worked well and I can almost make out some sort fo movement from this drawing.