Hairstyle Thumbnails
Before starting my character sketches I wanted to do a quick exercise in which I drew hairstyles inspired by the games I was most inspired by including Sky: children of the Light, One Shot & Kingdom Hearts. During this experimentation, I was also looking at images such as a crow and a Cat, which I wanted to base my character on. I would then incorporate the features of the animal into the hairstyles I drew for. For a Crow-inspired design I went for a layered haircut to mimic the layer of feathers and for a cat-inspired design, I made a hairstyle with cat ears and messy hair strands. I found this exercise very useful in my drawing process as it helped stimulate my imagination by getting me to already imagine a character inspired by the Game IP and references I was inspired by. I tested myself to do more rough and quick drawings so I could focus less on the details of the hairstyle by the silhouette as a whole.
Accessories/Weapon thumbnails
After Drawing Hairstyle thumbnails for my character, I went on to draw accessories for my character, I was looking at many ways existing media has referenced Steampunk outfits. A few inspirations included: Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who, Turnip Man from Howl’s Moving Castle and Ciel from black butler. I picked these references as they dressed to their period and their outfits stood out to me as a viewer. I noticed that most of these characters wore a few accessories which adds to their silhouette to make them more noticeable. I struggled to pick what objects I wanted to include in my character that would add to the job role of my character, being a locksmith. I did end up settling on the keys and lock and goggles as I thought They would be things that would be useful in my character’s story and add to what makes him who he is. I found finding existing references of people using steampunk very useful as it got me thinking about how accessories are used to accentuate one’s silhouette and add to their character.
Weapon Thumbnails
For my character I wanted to add objects to my character that linked more to the professional work of my character, being a locksmith. I wanted to use real-life objects as inspiration for my character as I wanted them to link to objects that were used by a locksmith in the Victorian era, I also wanted to have real-life textures to look back upon when I will be texturing my model in the future. By using real-life objects I can make my objects look semi-realistic.
Expression Sheet
As a quick exercise, I created a character expression sheet for my character. The reason for this is that I believe expressions are important for conveying a character’s emotions and making them more relatable to viewers. I also believe I can investigate all of the ways my character’s facial structure would change for each emotion, which could be useful if I wanted to create an idle animation for the character. It was a challenge for me because I am not used to focusing on facial expressions, so doing this exercise really tested my drawing abilities on this character, and it felt like I brought it to life.
Improving Sketch Designs
I went to get feedback on my character turnaround because I wanted to ensure that it was as accurate as possible. However, I received a few constructive criticisms, including the fact that I failed to draw some of the clothing from the opposite perspective, such as suspenders, scarves, goggles straps and belt straps. Other criticisms included the fact that the ears were too large and the character proportions did not fully align with the other perspectives, so I was taught a method to align everything by drawing lines on top of the drawing to see where all of the character’s points met. I found this useful because I was modelling previously and nothing aligned when I checked the model from different perspectives, so I assumed my drawing was inaccurate.
Colour Analysis
After sketching my character designs , I was looking at colour schemes for my character designs, I used both colour references from my Game references, Sky: children of light and One Shot to see how different the colour palettes affect my design. In addition, I made my own colour palettes after studying other colour palettes which resulted in these 6 designs.
1 : Colour palette made by me – used a more cold colour palette, used white against blue to resemble the night sky. The gold accents contrast the cold colour palette making the objects such as the lock and and keys stand out. White hair and Dark skin inspired by Sky: Children of the light and Colour palette is inspired by One shot character Niko. /i really liked this design but if I were to improve upon this design I would change the colour of the skin because against the cold colour palette of the clothing it made the skin look more green and less brown.
2 : Colour palette inspired by the colour palette of Sky: Children of the light – The earthy colour scheme or green and brown contrasts the vivid orange making it become an accent colour. The warm colour palette is balanced by the cold skin colour colour making the character’s overall tone look more balanced. It looked good but unfortunately to me the characters didn’t make the character look unique and all the colours were muted so it didn’t appeal to me.
3 : Colour palette directly inspired by One Shot character Niko – I wanted to see how my character would look like in another characters colour palette and since Niko looks similar to my character I wanted to see the colours onto my own character base. It wasn’t my favorite but It was interesting using a colour combination I wouldn’t normally go for E.g. two similar purple hues, and vivid colours.
4 : Colour palette by the colour palette of a scene in Sky: Children of the light – I wanted to test a completely cold colour palette which differ from most of my other designs which either leaned more into a warmer palette or were balanced. It gave a different vibe to my character, it made it look more cutesy but unfortunately It wasn’t the look I was going for.
5 : Colour palette inspired by steampunk aesthetic – In the steampunk aesthetic clothes are more dark and have a motif of browns and beige which I wanted to include in my study, I made the hair light and skin dark to reference Sky: Children of the light character design’s but I realised that the skin was too dark so when I improve it I need to lighten the characters skin a bit so the facial features are a bit more visible.
6 : Colour Palette inspired by One shot character Calamus – I did another study just like the 3rd colour palette and referenced an existing game character’s palette. I didn’t like this colour palette the most as it really stirred away from my Game IP and the colours tonal value was so similar it didn’t really stand out to me.
Improvements & final Choice
I improved my designs by responding to my own feedback on changing the skin colours. These two designs were my favourites, so I couldn’t decide which one to go with. However, after considerable thought, I chose the first design because the colour scheme appeared more unique and was most closely related to my Game IP and references. The reason I say this is that the white hair and dark skin directly reference the character designs of the sky, and the simplistic colour palette with a vivid accent colour reminded me of the one-shot character, which was more prominent than the left. Lastly, the colours of the objects seem to align with my vision more e.g. diamonds as a white star pattern on the scarf, rusty gold keys and a wooden handle for the hammer.
But, in general, the idea of planning out the colours through multiple designs really helped me think about how I wanted to present my character. Because my target audience is Teens and Adults, I wanted to show a variety of colour palette options to see what would suit my audience the best. I also received feedback from people in my demographic, and the majority agreed with the first design, so I chose the first one after taking into account what people in my demographic preferred.
Further Character process Evaluations
Making object for character
I wanted to make a key object to my character’s design, thus I started to model the keys to my character. The simplistic shape was made by manipulating existing poly shapes using the edge loop tool and extending to create new faces. However, I used a new tool in this creation, I used the text tool to make the 3D text of ‘milo’ on the keys which was pretty simple to use and helped save time than manually making each letter.
Although topology made things easier to UV due to less faces I still struggled due to having to individually cut out each face since the shape is quite complicated. In addition, I had to manually UV all 4 keys due to the slight differences that made up these set of keys.
After topology, I added textures by first making a gradient background on all keys then adding a layer of red rust texture on top to match my previous metal lock & goggles textures. For the keyring I did a blue background and layed yellow rust to make the object look aged. By this point, I was confident using Substance painter due to all my past textured items making it easier to make these textures quickly.
Problems during 3D project & Feedback.
Baking Stage
I faced many problems in the baking stage which hindered my progress during my project. When I baked my character with all the assets together, I had a look at all the errors I had which included the errors around feet, suspenders, hair and T-shirt. I tried extending the cage to the max but it made my character look unrecognizable. So to try fix the problem I had to individually fix each asset’s topology and maybe UV to get rid of the error sign in the baking. I then had to bake each asset individually to make sure I get the cleanest bake. this resulted in the baking process taking a while to get past by. I show my progress of solving my baking problem below.
The problems I have had during the baking stage also the texture looking weird this was because all the assets overlapped each other in addition, I didn’t upscale some of the baking options such as the resolution and super sampling size which resulted in the textures looking weird. Lastly, i had to soften some edges so that the baking looked smoother, resulting in a few trial and errors during the baking stage.
I was also lucky to be able to ask my teacher for the problems I’ve struggled in this process. For example, I couldn’t topology my suspenders but I was told that the plane for the suspenders was too thin hindering my progress of being able to topology it. Which resulted in me having to extend the plane to make it thick enough for me to topology.
Texturing Stage
I had sent images of my texturing process to my teacher for some feedback as I wanted to know how I can improve my textures and how I can transfer this onto my character. The feedback I had included having to add more details to the lower half of the character e.g. stitches on strap and yellow band to separate the pants from the shoes, this was because to the teacher the character would look plain in the lower half of the character which was the reason why I had to add more details to make the character look more interesting throughout. To solve this problem when I later re-texture the assets I sought to implements my teachers improvement onto my character.
The other feedback I have had included adding a 3D element to the edge of the sleeves of the t-shirt and to narrow down the pants at the hem to separate the pants from the shoes. However, this was already done in my highpoly version of my character which got lost in translation when I topologized the character which resulted in a loss of details. However, in the future I aim to make sure I don’t lose details such as this even if it adds to the face count, as although it was doable I didn’t have enough time to be able to implement the change thus, I had to make sure i documented this feedback.
Creating Animation
When uploading my character onto the software AcurRig I had to place these points onto each main body part of the rigging skeleton as these points were cruicial in the movement of the limbs. Although, the points aren’t fully accurate as with the hand it wouldn’t matter as the computer will automatically create the movements to the best of its ability.
This was the base animation for the character but I had to upload it onto Maya to then add textures and lighting to the character.
I uploaded the animation onto time editor, and shortened it to the time frame that i wanted. After that, I added my textures and lighting to the character and recorded the animation. This process was pretty simple however, if I were to improve I would manually rigged the character to make my own unique animations.
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