This project has been a long one. We started this 4 week project during the last week of the turret project, so its felt like we've been doing a 7 or 8 week long project and the work load has started to take its toll. it feels good to finally be finished and have a bit of a break before beginning to work on my portfolio.

Well lets look at my character project. The brief was to create two characters in Dichotomy, we had to design both characters but only model one of them. I began this project by researching into the themes i wanted my characters to fit into. 

One the best ways i find to research is by using Pinterest, just a few choice words and you can find a lot of interesting images, from this i created mood boards, the style i was going for was a punk rocker girl, with the colour palette of 80s sports wear. i decided that i wanted my character to fit into a street fighter style of game, and i looked at women UFC fighters for inspiration.

the next stage after i had a strong idea of theme was to create some silhouettes, i followed this design pipeline from the book "the skilful huntsman" which shows a lot of different students process for creating characters. after creating a bunch of these silhouettes i narrowed down to the ones i like the most and then drew over them to get a rough idea of my characters. At this stage i then presented my characters to my tutors to for feedback, and the general feeling was that people weren't too into the santa feeling that the fat character was giving.

After the feedback i decided to work more on the relationship between the two characters, and one of my tutors was quite excited by the personal trainer who is really unhealthy idea. This idea bring a lot of inspiration from the stereotypical boxing films where underdog is being trained by the 'has been' who's let him self go. (Danny Devito in Hercules is a good example of this) 




With a better idea of my characters i decided to go on to creating some quick paintings and sketches of what my main character would look like, The three sketches in the middle seem to go down the best with the tutors as they were fans of the character and attitude that those sketches had, which i kinda lost as i went into modelling. I was personally a big fan the the big puffy coat idea as i thought it created an interesting silhouette.



The next stage was to create a value sheet of my two characters, i ended working into my main character a lot more and used this as my reference sheet for my final outcome.

The next thing i decided to do was work more into my second character. I wanted to create the first character so i felt i was best i still developed the second one as much that if i was going to model him (which i plan to do) so that i know what directions i can take him.

Now begins the modelling, it had been a while since i had modelled a character so i thought i would be most beneficial to research into the topology and anatomy of a women as much as possible to create something that would work in industry. My main focus was the topology of the face as i felt this was going to be the hardest part, though looking back now i think i should have looked more into things like knees and shoulders, which are subtle parts of the body but when they of wrong you can just tell... its that uncanny valley effect.

This was my base mesh for my character i am happy with it but like i said before a lot of things need work, the knees are really screaming at me for some attention. 

This is the final untextured model, most of my feedback from my 3d teachers was that they were quite happy with the topology, i tried to make it as clean as possible. From my presentation the feedback was that i had lost the femininity along the way which i had in my original sketches. I personally think i need to go back and redo the hair as i don't like the solid mesh that i went for in the end.

The plan for this project was always to do a zbrush sculpt of the model. the risks in this was that its was a brand new software and it can take a long time to get proficient at using softwares, it took me a while to become confident in photoshop and 3Dsmax and so i expected the same with zbrush and i wasn't wrong its a tricky software to get used to. Because of this i decided to only dedicate a weekend to working on this sculpt, that way if i get something i like i can use it. But if it all goes wrong I've only lost a weekend which aren't actually days we have to be working. In the end i was able to create a model that i really liked, with feedback from my 3d tutor i looked at loads of ref on how folds work and the ways the crease break in different materials.

From this sculpt i was able to bake a normal map and a AO map of my character, which in the end saved me a lot of time because then i just had to focus of the albedo and allowed me to spend a good few days working up all the detail into it. 

Heres is the final outcome, there is as i said throughout this post a lot of things i would change that i feel would make it an overall stronger model, but I'm very happy with my outcome so far.