Post Mortem

High res renders and Marmoset files can be found on the K-Drive

And its finished! After 20 weeks of work I’m happy to say I’ve completed my FMP and my last ever project for university. When I first started coming up with ideas for my project I wanted to make 4 AAA characters and an art book of its production that also included a ton of concepts. Basically I wanted to do two huge FMPs, which was so stupid I’m so thankful to my tutor Craig for spotting that when he did! I instead made 4 AAA characters which is what I wanted to do as a career path anyway, I have learnt a lot, and honestly I would do a lot differently if I was to do it again, but I’ll get into that more later.


Anyway! Here’s what I made! After spending so long on them it feels great to be finished. I’ve been staring at them for so long that to just take a step back and look at them all together I do feel a big sense of accomplishment.


Okay now the self-reflection.



What I Did?
So for this project my aim was to make four AAA characters that were all to a very high standard. I wanted to show that I could design a group of characters and take them all the way through the pipeline, starting from concepting all the way to rigging and displaying in real-time (I used Marmoset).

I wanted to this project to show that I could maintain a level of quality in all the characters so that they all look like they come from the same universe, and work together. I knew this would be tricky because obviously within 20 weeks I was going to be a lot better artist then when I started, so the last character could look drastically different from the first.

I wanted to show that I could also make these characters within similar deadlines as character artists in industry. So each had roughly 4 weeks of work to them. I felt this was an important goal because I wanted to become comfortable to this kind of time restraints, as well as to show I can work as close to the real deal as possible.

What I’ve learnt?
I feel I have a very strong understanding of what character art really takes now, where as before I just knew that it was something I wanted to pursue. I think doing this project has allowed me appreciate what I now need to learn, such as face studies, anatomy, materials and so much more. So even though I don’t feel I have learnt all the things I need to become a character artist I know what those things are so I can now start to try and learn them, which I think is almost as important. It can be hard to know what you need to know! This isn’t a great example of what I’ve learnt during this project but I wanted to touch on it because it’s very important to me, moving forward.

Something that I have learnt if I was going to do this project again I would scale it back even more. A fellow student has said something that has really stuck with me “its better to under promise and over deliver.” I feel this is great advice and the people that gave themselves smaller projects have much stronger out comes then people with much bigger projects. I feel that if I did just three characters, they would be too a much higher standard. When I recently asked for crit off the art director for total war at creative assembly, he said that I have actually done too much for a grad portfolio, and I should scale it back.

I have learnt that variation is incredibly valuable; if I were to change one thing about this project it would be to follow some of the other character artists on my course and do three characters that are totally separate projects. I have learnt a strong appreciation of breaking up big projects. Smaller projects that are different will keep my attention more and I wont get bored of them especially when the are 20 weeks long. This might be the most important thing I’ve learnt.



How have I progressed as an artist?

I believe I have developed a lot as a character artist during this project, I now feel I can approach most characters and do them justice in 3d, which is something I wouldn’t be able to say before this project. I feel I know a lot about most aspects of character art, including hair, which is something I really wanted to develop an understanding for during this project.

I have become more confident with forms and how to exaggerate them, even though I don’t know how successful I was in exaggerating forms in my FMP it’s something I feel I can now perform. With making aliens that have very similar anatomy to humans I had to try and get the balance between recognizable and different, with out it looking like mistakes.

I feel my texturing has improved a lot since starting this project. I can now work comfortably in substance and Photoshop, as well as using a combination of the two. I think I really started to figure this out during texturing my first guitar, I think I got really good results because It gave me a chance to go into vey small detail with it and I then was able to apply that to overall look of the characters.


What went well?
I think something that really jumps out at me as successful was the hair on my characters. It took me the whole project before I really getting the results I wanted. It’s still something I want to keep developing, but it feels awesome to go from have having no clue how to do it, to now it being something that gets the most praise from people. I now want to tackle realistic hair as I went for semi stylized in my FMP characters.

Another aspect that I feel went good was that I think they read well together. This was one of the main aims of my characters to have them all together in a scene. I think this was important because it shows an equal quality to them, which if they didn’t have means they wouldn’t look right together. I also think it shows that my original concept was a successful idea because it could be visualized in 3d.

One of the main things to go well was my time keeping and planning; I had a very tight schedule, which I stuck to. This meant that everything went relatively smoothly because I gave myself a large amount of polish time. I think this was a good idea to work they way I did, by working hard for smaller amounts of time, and then have a lot of time after to get feedback and refine my work based on it. As apposed to spending a lot of time and not moving on and then still getting a lot of crit but not enough time to address it.

What didn’t go well?
One of the main things that I’m not very happy with is the clothing on the lead singer. Looking back on it now I can see how I would do it very differently firstly I would try to make the clothing look more like how I was made in real life. For example I was given some crit from Blair about the skirt “Skirt looks like it should be shinier, the wrinkles look like it should be made of a thin, silken material. If you intended to make it like an actual school skirt, they don't really have that many wrinkles and have a more solid structure.” This very much captures what I was feeling, even though I didn’t know what was wrong just something seemed off.

Another aspect that I don’t think went great was my material definition; I think I really struggled to get the materials (mostly with clothing) to look accurate to how they would in real life. Overall most of characters might be a bit too shiny in places, and I think this is something that I didn’t get to fully improve upon because I had to keep moving of to stay on track. Occasionally just spending really long time on something can teach you how to accurately do it, and then you can start working on speeding up workflow.

The main thing that I don’t think went well in this project is how it looks as a collection of pieces that showcase what I can do, I think I realized a little too late that they all kind of show the same things, such as my ability to do clothing etc. I think, like I mentioned earlier that three separate projects that show clothing and hard surface and maybe an animal would be a better portfolio, for going to get a job straight away, but I don’t know if I wanted to do exactly that because it was important to me to create these characters how they were, even if its not the perfect demonstration of my abilities.

Conclusion
In conclusion I personally feel this project was a big success for me and even though there’s a lot I would do differently, the learning experience I gained from this I wouldn’t trade for anything. This project represents the summation of everything I’ve done at Uni from this point; I feel it couldn’t have gone better. The characters that I have produced were made on my terms to my specifications, which is a level of control I haven’t had before so that fact I didn’t all go up in flames has given me a lot of self confidence in my abilities. I look forward to taking what I’ve learnt on this project and at Uni and pushing it further in my personal development as I look for a job as a character artist roles in industry.