Week 4: Helmeted Character

This week's post is probably going to be quite the essay, as I've really stepped up my game with this project. The last brief left me really dissatisfied, mostly down to the fact I was quite unprepared, uninspired and overly cautious about both the brief and the technical limitations. I feel like as a third year I should be able to produce a consistent level of quality, whether I like the brief or not. It was a poor excuse for me to do an unsatisfactory job but there you go. The past is the past and all I can do now is move on and ammend those mistakes in these following projects. I've been preparing for this helmeted character brief for quite some time now, as I was originally going to do this project first. So for a while now I;ve been trowling through Pinterest looking for ideas and inspiration. I didn't want to go all out starting my own concept from scratch, so I was looking for something I could use, and interpret and adapt in my own way. I stumbled upon a Korean artist known as BHEAD, who essentially kitbashes in real life with dolls and models he creates himself. There's a consistent level of crazy in the post-apocalyptic characters he designs that really drew me in. The colours, the shapes, the bizzare costumes, all of it had me in love right from the start.

So as my work actually began I first set about producing a concept to follow. I didn't want to stray too much from the images I was basing my character off, so I essentially just chose aspects of each one that I liked and tried to combine them. I plan to iterate on the colours and values further down the line but for now I just came up with a basic version. I do like the Yellow/Teal/Orange Colour scheme on the helmet and backpack, so I think I will probably keep it that way.

I began blocking out basic shapes in Zbrush for the helmet. I found Zbrush to be quite effective for essentially concepting in 3D. I would create smaller asssets, usually based around Cylinders, Spheres and Squares, and play around with the positioning and detail. This is my first time attempting hard surface in Zbrush and I think once i got into the hang of it the design and iteration process became very fast. There are a few very versatile tools that can be used to create pretty much anything.

Above is the helmet on a basemesh I made for this character. I tried to avoid unnecessary detail on the basemesh as hopefully none of it will be seen on the final model.

I spoke to Mike kelly about the design of the helmet and he had a few points of advice for the character.

-make sure that you can fit all this detail into 30k tris

-don't forget you need to use symmetry in this project

-limit the clutter in some places so you have aread of rest and ares of detail

-rigging the breathing tube might be a problem, look into solving that

I later that day had an interesting conversation with another studetn about how the importance of colour is often overlooked, and we both looked at some interesting ways that existing games had approached colour with their characters and environments.

Here I was just exploring some more for the shape and silhouette of the character, making sure it would work well with the helmet I had modelled.

Here's an overpaint to show the colour scheme I am aiming to follow when it comes to texturing. Although the yellow looks a bit sickly and green at the moment. Maybe that would be a good design choice, because I don't exactly want to go for somethign with a really pretty colour scheme, I want the character to look almost shocking.

The more I develop this character, the more I'm starting to think back to the original Bioshock game, and how scary yet fascinating the design of the Big Daddy was. That really bulky unnatural silhouette and the heavy looking metal costume and accesories that the character is having to carry around everywhere, making it really sluggish but all the more intimidating to the player. I definately don't want to take it to the extemes that Bioshock did, as i still want the character to be humanoid, but just in an exxagerated way.

This week I also began work on the clothing in Marvelous Designer. I really feel that i am starting to understand the software more, although i am very aware of how realistically, I'd need to look in depth into fabric patterns and designs to really understand what i was doing. A lot of this jacket was made by just playing around with things in the software until it looked cool, which I know is the wrong way about things.

I thought at one point about changing the design so that his bottom half would be really skinny to contrast with the big heavy upper half, but in the end i decided it killed the intimidating Big Daddy vibe I was going for.

I attempted a quick sketch just to play aroudn with backpack ideas but again, realised that it would probably make more sense to do it in 3D.

So I went about blocking out the shapes of the backpack along with all the other details I hadn't added yet. The legs in the above blockout were just a quick Marvelous job and the rest was quickly blocked out in Zbrush

Above are some screenshots of the work i did in MD for the final clothing. Learning to use morph target was a great help in marvelous, as i was able to wrap objects i had made like belts and backpacks around the garments I had made. It worked particularly well for the overshized shirt he wears underneath the coat. All the clothing is oversized to some degree bacuase I wanted to try and keep some mystery as to what kind of person is underneath the clothing. The element of mystery really helps to sell the character as being something creepy. Again, going back to Bioshock, you never know what the creature looks like under the suit. Of course I'm still going for a humanoid shape, but the gender and build of the character remains a complete mystery. If this was for a game like fallout he could be a mutant, a radiation victim, etc.

I tried to keep the shapes of the trousers fairly simple as the legs are one area I plan to use symmetry on. My plan so far is that I will use symmetry on the legs, feet, hands, and backpack straps.

Above is all the work completed this week with a nice render, which is something i've been looking into a lot lately. It seems quite pointless to create a nice character if the render is poor quality. your rendering helps to show how professional you are and is a reflection of your visual accuity.