Week 2: The Spice Must Flow

I’m 2 weeks into the Aviator project now and I felt like I’ve made fairly good use of my time. I am definitely becoming a more efficient game artist, however I still have a lot to learn about where I can be efficient and where I should spend more time and care getting things right. I feel as though I jumped ahead to retopology too fast, and I regret not spending more time pushing the design and refining the sculpt.

I’ll start this blog with some of the feedback I got from tutors last week and how I responded to it. Firstly, Craig gave me some really helpful advice. One thing he pointed out was that the character lacks shape, she should probably be curvier and the silhouette should show that. I certainly did try to push the shape more, however I think I may revisit the shape on the low poly model later and try and make it even better. He liked my concept I did and pointed out a few areas where the model did not match the concepts, such as the hat which had an interesting shape that seemed to have been lost in the sculpting process. So I fixed that along with a few other more minor adjustments following Craig’s advice.

Above is my concept that I made before the sculpting process. I forgot to post this last week as there was a lot of other stuff that I needed to write about but this week I feel like I should probably explain some of the design choices and my reasoning behind them. Firstly, I felt that within the original concept we were given there was a lot of room for interpretation, particularly with the trousers and boots, the detail is almost non-existent so I took them in my own direction. I changed the design and positioning of the straps to fit a more realistic design, also just to provide something that I felt was more interesting to look at. The squashed and wrinkled effect on the leather from the straps was something I had seen on pinterest that I thought would suit the character. The design of the jacket was changed quite a bit, the fold at the front was moved to the side rather than directly in the middle because jackets with straps like the ones in the concept do not usually attach in the centre, they fold over. I also added a fur lining to the jacket and hat because that’s what almost all aviators would wear because of the temperatures in the sky. I feel there’s quite a strong association between aviators and pin up girls, so I decided I would give the character more of a dolled up appearance reminiscent of that era.

Later in the week Mike Kelly gave me some advice, however given the stage I was at in the production of the character there was not a lot of room for change (this was probably my biggest mistake) so the advice had to be somewhat limited. He told me to make the forms of anatomy more clear, particularly the wrist, as it appeared too soft and rounded. He also made a point about improving the shape and silhouette of the character. And finally some minor notes such as making the gem bigger and moving the Cravat out of the way so it is more visible. He also gave me some homework to follow Scott Eaton’s tutorials on anatomy as they are supposedly essential to character artists.

Mike Powell gave me some really interesting crit for looking outside of the box more with the character, and really try to think about the character in context to her environment. He showed me a clip from the 1938 film La Bete Humaine in which the depth of detail on the characters and their costumes were so detailed it looked as if they had picked up real Train Engineers and just started filming. The subtle details in the way the clothes were worn really made a difference in the believability of the characters.

And lastly another meeting with Mike Kelly during the beginning of the texturing stages where He told me to play around with the hair design and look at how other game artists have tackled hair, and to add material definition to all the materials.

This week has mostly consisted of polypainting, finalising the design, retopology, and baking. Currently I am not happy with the result of my character. I feel as though I should have spent more time on the sculpting and design of the character, and I should have polypainted before I retopoligised. I also feel like my retopology stills are not matching the rest of my work. A lot of the quality in my sculpt is lost by the fact I fall short in the retopology stages. Although I suppose 7,000 tris isn’t a lot so I did have my work cut out for me.