I have just finished the first week of my final project before FMP. Which i a scary thought, I am very excited about this one. Firstly its a really awesome brief that i want to do justice and secondly the aviator brief was very similar and i know where i messed up on that one. So i know what stages of the pipeline need more time, and what i should do differently.

I began this week by researching, my knowledge of world of Warcraft is very limited and i ended up watching hours of Warcraft lore on the weekend before this project. I thought this was important because even though i have a strong idea/understanding of there art style, i dont know much baout the actual game and so may choose a design for a character that doesn't fit the universe. It still might be the case, but i feel the character is stronger because of this as i would of just chosen a charcater completely different to this, if i didn't do my research.

On the Monday of this week i started by concepting my character, having done some resaerch i decided i wanted to do a dreanei character, as the race interested me the most.






I began by design 4 main base characters of what i might like to do, then i iterated on all of them to see how i could push them. I ended up liking the pandarian variant the most, so i refined that one more, then began to model it. This was my final idea, i liked the concept that a draenei visited the lands of pandaria and fell in love with the lands and culture and adopted there way of life. I dont kinow how well this fits the universe but i liked the idea, and I've ask other people there also were into the idea of a draenei monk.
I began modelling on tuesday, i got the physique of the character figured out using a helpful website called wowhead.com which allows you to look at the 3d models of characters. so i had the base mocked up pretty quick, and began on the clothes. these are some progress shots of the character.


 I received a lot of helpful crit from Craig this week among this was that my character at this stage, still was not reading as a wow character, and i needed to make the design more over the top. He suggested i add more Armour and something the the front, so there's more geometry there. Listening to Craig I went into the design more, and i am much happier with the result.
before and after crit
I then move onto retopo, im moving quite fast in this project because I've learnt the way to make this project pay off is to put a lot of time and effort into texturing, which is my plan, i ended this week finishing my topology and being about 900 tris over budget so my plan is spend some time cutting that down and generally refining the mesh. Then i will unwrap, pack and hopefully have a lot of time left over to really work into the textures.