3D Toolkit: Game Ready Character: Pre-Production

Game Ready Character: Pre-Production:
For my game ready character I want to create a character with anatomy more closely resembling that of the human norm, unlike my previous Alien Priest who had legs more birdlike in nature and a slightly hunched torso.
I already had a fairly narrow idea for my character in mind: a bulky soldier from a far-future science fiction setting, perhaps comparable to the Alien Priest I created previously. As such, I began collecting some reference images that fit my idea, taking inspiration from the character designs of the artists I researched, statues showing togas and flowing robes, illustrations and games art relating to science-fiction armour and examples of real world space suits.



I knew I wanted to blend elements of amour with fabric: as such, I began by creating several designs for a human character, focusing on the overarching shape of the body and outline before tackling specific facial features or designs for the body. I wanted to create a character with a somewhat bulky silhouette, again in contrast to the largely wiry Alien Priest. As such, I used a more blocky silhouette shape in my designs, with broader shoulders and a wider pelvis. In the end, I decided on a female character as such, with the overall body shape being wider at the pelvis and slightly narrower at the shoulders, which I nonetheless wanted to seem bulky and broad.

I took definite inspiration from my artist research when designing this character, an armoured soldier with armour patterning and an overall design that draws some parallels from Mike Brennan's character sculpts, with detail being put into simplistic patterns in the sleek armour over the body, which in and of itself is close to human anatomy in form, not necessarily bulky in addition to the silhouette, but instead a comparatively thinner covering over it. I also wanted to include some aspect of fabric in this design, as I found the fabric creation process I undertook in the previous sculpt very enjoyable and wish to expand my skills in such a workflow: my chosen design contains fabric and the front and back of the body, as well as across the sides, which I think will be a challenge to create and sculpt. I also feel that the face and hair will be challenging, and I tried to keep my design simple as such: the face is wide and very sharp, with somewhat small features, and the hair is similarly blocky in form. I may experiment in the process of creating the hair, perhaps including it as a separate subtool and using a process similar to that of the fabric, creating a block form in Blender that I could then sculpt atop in ZBrush. In my scheduling I will account for this expected difficulty and experimentation.

On the whole, I feel that my final design is definitely simpler than the Alien Priest in terms of design principles, not having the hard surface - soft surface blend that the design did. Nonetheless, there are aspects of this design that I predict I will find difficulty in sculpting, namely the face, hair and fabric. I will also use more tools in this design, perhaps using VDMs for the patterns across the torso and shoulders and using Alphas to more subtly indicate texture across the armoured torso or in the hair. Of the thumbnail designs I produced, I was incredibly fond of the scarf-like robe that flowed over the shoulders. Though I removed this in my final design, I may go back and create this should I have the time. 

SCHEDULING
The following is a rough Gannt Chart that shows how I will spend my time in the production of this character asset. In practice, I will try to expedite the first half of the project - including the IMM blockout and armour sculpting - to allow for robust time towards the end, which will likely be the more challenging aspects of production.