Planning, Production & Practical

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Planning

Reference Gathering

Planning

Reference gathering is the most important part of the research phase for character design or even games development as it allows time for sketch artists and developers to scour the the internet or even real life and find sources for what a character can look like, games such as Destiny 2,have used both of these reference gathering strategies to design their games characters, character items and even the lore surrounding them

Specifically looking at games such as:

Destiny 2's most recent DLC "Witch Queen" which has it's focus on real life reference gathering and clothing material use.

Killing Floor 2 as a whole, which has its character outfits and voice lines as its main objective along with replay ability.

Destiny 2 Witch Queen DLC Poster & clothing material use

Looking into the Destiny 2 Witch Queen Poster, It is seen that the contents of it follow a grounded and woodland as well as cavernous approach. With that, what appears to be the focus in terms of the landscape and deep shades of the colour spectrum is contested with the brighter and freer tones and colours, as shown by the three unnamed guardians donning what appears to be light blues and close to white materials, shining metallic armour and even weapons and "ghosts" with the same colour scheme.

Getting a closer look into what the Titan of three guardians were wearing, it is evident that to fit more to the theme of greens and browns of the environment in the poster. the what was bright white and blue materials have now been changed to a more swampy brown and mossy green. With the blues of the armour now a lot more discreet and only visible when the sun or objects that emits light is shone against the armour at an angle. the whites of the armour, especially on the vest and gloves have been replaced by a coral grey, seemingly to try blend the swamp brown into the moss green and then into the midnight blues of the wrists and boots.

This chest armour, only available to the Hunter class in the game, has had innovations from real clothing and protection sets like an adapted and futuristic version of a corset, which has also been mixed with a classical fencing jacket where the groin protection was not adopted. the actual chest plate itself is a blend between the VR haptic feedback chest-plate by OOC, the culture and symbolic outreach and eye can make and the flak jacket worn by those in the Iranian embassy siege.

KillingFloor 2 character choice and outfits

The outfits from Killing Floor 2 as a whole give me a direction into how I wanted to set my characters up. By this I mean that the characters that I was to create have dressed themselves as they would if they were real. not how I would as a the artist. what this entails is that the characters created would have given themselves their own flair or addons to accentuate their personality or how they carry themselves.

keeping to the rules of my own character creation, I used the Killing Floor character editor to show the possibilities of what a character in the game might look like. With the first image being that of what the characters base design would normally be, then the second image of the same character being what the player if they have the play time required to unlock what I have displayed, can make the character look like. Every character has many different styles, and this was something that I was going to adapt into my FMP. with one image of my characters with a normal design, then another with a "Player chosen" design to make it seem as if a player had gone through and picked what my games games characters could look like.

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Reference Boards

Reference boards help artists and designers create what it is that they have been asked to designer or create by grabbing pre-existing examples of every day objects or even characters, such as anime characters that have a specific design aspect to them that is wished to be emulated onto another character.

References

Character A

For my first character, I Decided to create a "Light-wish" Cultist from my reference boards in Hero-Forge, and with that design of the cultist, I know what I would like my male character to look like, with the wearied look taken from Disney's Encanto, Character "Bruno Madrigal." The Skull mask has been used to further develop a more sinister mask with a more metallic look, The sigils that I have used in my reference will be changed a little and planted into the robes the character wears, as to give off a more established look for the cult itself.

Character B

During the reference gathering of my second character I started to mess around with ideas, and soon found myself looking into the female helicopter pilots scene, especially the news article of "The Female Pilot That Took on The Taliban-and The Pentagon". This article gave me the grand idea of what I should do for my character, but instead of a white, blonde haired, blue eyed woman, I decided to give my character Brazilian descent. With this choice I decided to look into other women in games, to which I found Caveira, a fictional character from the game "Rainbow Six Siege". I chose Brazilian as the base design because I felt like the representation of playable entities is only shared through the main European, North-American, or Asian countries.

Character C

My Third and final character was originally based off ideas of black female character recognition, I feel as if there is not enough characters of a diverse background. In feeling this way, I designed a character that takes notes from different protagonists from games that I had played personally and real life instances such as Nadine Ross from the "Uncharted Series" and Clementine from The TellTale Games' "Walking dead" series. With these two characters used as the main backing for my character, for support I Used Life-line and Watson from "APEX-Legends" along with the player character from RAZE for clothing choice and backpack, Skrillex for her hair style, "The Wolf" from "MW2019" for her eyes and finally real life African tribal paints and tattoos for the markings on my characters arms and face.

Art Style & Colour

Art style and colour are important to a character artist as it allows the artists and developers to have a debate back and forth on whether a specific set of colours is better for that specific set, it also helps with not just characters, but also set designers and world builders.

Art Styl & Colour

My Art Style And Colour Choice:

Having gone back through my initial proposal, I decided to change the way I will be colouring my characters, having had a talk with A Freelancer, Industry Professional and a lecturer, I was persuaded to can my randomised colouring scheme; Instead opting for a more balanced colour scheme consisting of a matching main colour, for my instance, I chose a soft blue. be it by metal, glass, cloth or other material. with other colours that can work well with it. such as pale greys, black or burnt browns, even reds or other blues.

Why am I using "Coolors.co"

I am using Coolors.co for my fixed colours scheme as I used it for the randomisations. My reasoning for this is because it was a great site for getting the colour pallets that I originally wanted, albeit randomised; But it can also function as a site that allows me to pick a set of pre-designed colour pallets.

Colour Pallets

Colour Pallets

Colour Pallets Chosen:

Cultist:

For my Cultist character, I decided to try stick to the reference colour pallet with the creams, soft blues and reds. Along with them, I decided to add a little more brown into the mix to offset the cream colour and give the robes more of a "Used and Abused" feel. With the Reds, I kept them as blood like as I could, as I wanted to give the impression of the cultists being a character for a horror game, either as an Antagonist, or Conscientious Objector

Pilot

Using colours I could find in my Pilots reference 3D model created via HeroForge, I then moved further into the blues and greys for the clothing, and as for the skin colour, I purposely went for more "skin tone" set of browns with the hopes at getting the correct skin colour normally depicted with people from the Southern Americas.

Soldier

Starting off on the Future Soldier, I wanted to get a set of skin tones to use, most likely going to use two or three of the darker skin tones in the browns that I selected. When looking through the blues mixed with the greys, what I tried to grab was a bluish-silver that when made to look metallic when drawn onto a character would fade from one to another depending on what angle the sun or light source had on the armour. With Pallet C, I wanted to give background colours that allowed the full character to be seen without the need for a black or plain white outline.

Hardware & Software To Be Used

For my Software To Be Used, I will be talking about the software that I intend to use to complete my work, be it applications that allow the usage of drawing tablets, drawing applications themselves and even contingency applications that allow for if I am not able to come into college such as if I was to get a highly transmissible illness E.G: NoroVirus or CoronaVirus

Hardware & Software

Drawing Tablet Hardware & Software

Drawing Tablets, Pens and Drivers

Drawing Tablets made by Wacom such as the "Wacom Intuos" or the "Wacom Intuos Pro" are tablets that are named almost the same but have a vast difference in what I can do with them, those differences being that with the pro variation of the tablet I would be able to perform a larger number of actions such as change the brush type, the size of the brush I would be using and the canvas orientation, by this I mean that I would be able to rotate the image on screen with just a button on the pro, which would be very important for my work in the FMP.

In the event I cannot come into college for any reason, I will be using the "Wacom Intuos", whereas when I am within College, I will be using the "Wacom Intuos Pro". The loss of advantages I would have with the normal variant of the tablet would be that of those described above, but the overall performance of both tablets Pro or not should be the same.

Drawing Pens that I will be using are both from Wacom as the tablets refuse to pair correctly to styli from other companies, the name of the Stylus itself would not matter as long as it was from the Wacom company.

Drawing Tablets use "Drivers" so that they are able to be used in tandem with a drawing pen and or mouse, Companies such as Wacom or Adobe are the top two contenders that give out drawing tablet "drivers".

Wacom LTD

Adobe Corp

What is a "Driver?"

A Driver is a piece of downloadable content that can be found on either Wacom's or Adobe's website, in which the downloadable content searches the computer for a USB connected tablet and matching or linked pen, then brings up a menu that allows for pen sensitivity and custom controls for the buttons on the pen and tablet. Such as shortcuts to saving the work, reverting a mistake that was made and or zooming in and out of the image.

Drawing Software to Be Used

Drawing software that I will be using will range between either Adobe Photoshop or GIMP, both of which have the capability to use the drawing tablet and pen, and both can use the files the other one saves as, be it ".PSD" (PhotoShop Document) or ".XCF" (eXperimental Computing Facility). The reason I have chosen both of these creation software applications is because they are both readily available if I am at home, in which I will be using GIMP, as opposed to Photoshop, which I can utilise at College.

The differences between the two different creation software's are few, but the differences that they have are that as an open source application, GIMP will not have as many or as detailed brushes, style choices or functions. Photoshop however, having been created by a massive corporation filed with industry professionals, has a lot more usable brushes, styles and functions.

Photoshop is also the creative software that I have more time on and have had the ability to design and learn to a proficiency.

G.I.M.P Software

Photoshop Software

Production

Production of Characters

Producton

Step 1, boots, legs and belt again, laces and creaes in trousers.PNG

Step 1, Legs, shoes and belt, leave space for upper body and arms.PNG

Step 1, Legs, Boots, Belt and ammo box.PNG

Step 1, Legs,Leg armour, Boots, Ammo pouch and Belt.PNG

Step 1 in character production: In step one, I start off drawing the feet, shoes and the legs, then colour and shade them all in. The way I had decided to do the shading was by reflecting back to my 3D models which I had created earlier in the FMP and using them as a base, with the light sources that bounced off the models, replicated the same way for the 2D drawn characters.

By doing this, I was able to successfully have two of every colour, such as deeper creams, blues and reds, all to fit the characters' shaded and exposed to light components.

Step 2, Add in torso, rear of body armour and arms not robotic hand.PNG

Step 2, Add torso, body armour, ammo puches and ams,Left arm and hand only, robotic needed

Step 2, Add Torso, Tribal Markings, rear of pulse gun and arm shields.PNG

Step 2, Torso, Arms, Tribal tattoos and gun.PNG

Step 2 in Character Production: For my second step in the production phase of my character creation pack, I added in the chest pieces such as the cloak for the cultist, the body armour and pouches for the pilot as well as the futuristic armour plating for the soldier.

The images of the front view where there is a void of black on the characters is where I had planned to put the neck and heads of my characters and even attachments, an example would be that for the cultist I had a plan of making a tall collar that would also turn into a hood so that when he dawned his mask, he had a more cult like feel to him. Another example for this would be my Future soldier, who was to wear an under armour shirt that would look more like a fleece or armless tactical shirt.

The reason why my pilot is missing their right arm and hand is because as she was born with a condition of congenital amputation, what this means is that she was brought up only able to use her left arm and hand, and thus became left hand dominant.

Step 3, Add in hood, keep head mssing as dont know where to begin.PNG

Step 3, Add hood, remove thye inky blackness.PNG

Step 3, Add in Robotic hand, colour and shade to fit character selection.PNG

Steo 3, Add in robotic hand and shade, coloir accurately to the rear oof the pilot charact

Step 3 in Character Production: For my Third step, Continuing to colour and shade in as I went, I wanted to give a focus onto both the hood of the cultist and the bionic arm of the pilot,. Both characters having a little more detail than the future soldier as I was running out of time for my production phase.

What I waned to do for the cultist was to have the hood completely surround his neck so that he seemed far more superior than what he actually was. And as for the bionic arm the pilot had, I wanted to keep to my colour scheme that I had, and so made a slightly more metallic bluish silver colour for the arm; Also using this colour pallet for the pilots belt buckle and laces.

For the pilot specifically, If I had not improvised for the colour of the arm and joints I do not think I would have had a viable bionic a that would have fit the character, especially in the colour theory aspect and background story I had written about the characters all coming together because of the future soldier to defeat a common evil that had ruined all of their lives in separate instances.

Step 4, Add in back of head, plus added ponytail because long hair and cool.PNG

Step 4, Finish Head, Try not to look at mouth.PNG

Step 4, Add if head, neck and helmet, no hair showing for professionalism in pilot.PNG

Step 3, Add neck, head and hair, Add piercing for ear and helmet mount.PNG

Step 3, Add shirt colour, head, hair and percing.PNG

Step 4 in Character Production: In my Final step when designing and drawing up my characters, I started off with the hair and facial features.

Starting out with the cultist design and changing it from the originally planned standard black hair to a more aged greyish and white hair and instead of a sleek back hairstyle like in my original design, I went for a ponytail to show off the fact that the cultist is dedicated to the cult that he is within, and thus hasn't gotten a haircut to try help prove such dedication.

For the Pilot, I decided to keep her helmet on as opposed to her ID card photo, this was because I felt like I needed to help the Pilot stand out just as much as the others, especially if a person was given just picture of the three characters full final designs and told to label what they (an audience) thought they were.

When designing the Future Soldier I had problems with structuring the face and the 3D model I had created was not much of a help when being used as a guide because I felt like I was making the nose and mouth too big as well as disproportionately coloured to the rest of the character itself. Not wanting this as it would be seen as racially insensitive, I scrapped the lower half of the nose and face to then replace it with a mask that would cover and conceal the real Identity from anyone that did not know her within the universe the characters exist in.

Headshots of the Characters: My Headshots designed specifically for my ID Cards look different from what I had originally designed with the 3D models on HeroForge as I felt that I needed to push further in my capability to originally design a set of characters given accurate references and dimensions; Even going as far as to go back and add details that I had thought of whilst designing the final headshots to previous works such as the pilots blue original eye make-up and eyes, as well as changing the deep black and crimson of the cultists' uniform to a brighter baby blue. Changing from "Cult of the Crimson Sun" to "Followers of Light".

Final Full Designs of Characters

Cultist: "Follower of the Light"

Final Designs