Week 8: Have you ever heard of a robot?

This week has been a fairly straightforward one. I've not had much feedback from my usual tutors this week so it's mostly just been me trying to do the best I can with developing Ideas and self evaluating.

There's been a lot of iterating design and creating new assets so It's not really worth showing all of that, I'll just show a few of my particular favourites, such as this helmet, where I considered the fact that it may look good to have some areas of rest, where there is not much detail and the aesthetic quality relies mainly on the shape of the object. I tried to produce an interesting looking head shape which was influences by Darren Bartley's style.

I started thinking more about the context of the characters, and considered splitting them into different roles: Warroir, Priest, Shaman, etc. Although these would need to fit into Aztec culture within reason. Above is a more slim fitting armour that would probably be used for combat, and one that looks slightly more lower class, whereas the other armour I have been created has a certain elegance to it, as the character would probably be some sort of leader or god.

Above is a more finalised version of last week's character. I spoke to Stas at the beginning of this week and he suggested going for a rather ceremonial look with the character, which I have done with the above photos. Also his pose will hopefully reflect this. He said he also liked the idea of tubes and cylinders replacing things like feathers in the costume design, and I should push that more within the design.

One of the things Stas said was that he would like to see me push the non-human aspect of the characters more It's a character concepting brief, not a production brief, so I should be trying to push the boat out a little more. So that's what i tried to do with this character. I have him a really heavy oversized looking upper body, and really distorted looking bio-mechanic arms. I also really exaggerated the size and amount of cylinders used on the character, my explanation for that being that it's an alien character, and a fairly ceremonial one at that, the objects may just be culture's fashion, just like real Aztecs used a lot of feathers.

Pretty much all of the Above renders were done in keyshot, which I've only recently started using, but it can produce really high quality renders with realistic lighting.

In my personal time I've also been working on finishing up detail on the male anatomy sculpture and getting started on the female anatomy, I hope to have at least one female character made this week as well, and hopefully these will be good anatomy studies for my portfolio.

Stas came and spoke to me again on friday and told me I need to consider what the final outcome would be, as I'm getting too consumed with all the cool and exciting aspects of what I am doing at the moment. I need to make sure my painting skills can support producing a final concept that will be equal to the rest of my standard of work. So following that advice I got to work on a small part of my character which didn't take too long to paint over.