Character Initial Ideas

Coming up with a character that has a evolution theme proved tough for me at first. But after a quick look on Google images I started developing ideas.


Some Ideas:

• What if humans become reliant on technology? - Could my design show how the human body would develop, an initial idea was similar to how the Disney Pixar film Wall-e, in which humans had been in low gravity not using muscles for a couple generations. This plays about with humans becoming incredibly lazy but what if...

• ...What if we kept evolving and getting smarter? - H.G Wells pondered this in the book 'The Man of the Year Million', his conclusion? that humans have evolved a massive brain at the expense of a body. Sounds odd but will technology result in decreased reliance on the body. In Darwinian theory of use it or lose it, even the simple knife and fork may eventually make the human jaw redundant. Motorized transportation would result in the withering away of legs. These are some initial thoughts.

• What would we look like with traits from the animal kingdom? - The idea of this was a sort of natural wing suit similar to that used by fly squirrels to glide from tree to tree, but what if human used them to glide between tall buildings.

• Another route i could go down in my designs would be to take a animal from its environment and drop it into another very different and imagine what it could possibly look like, an example: a horse in a aquatic environment (sea horse I guess you could say).

• As well as dropping animals into various environments I could splice some together such as a spider and a fly, creating a very efficient hunter?

• And finally I could look at animals today which have shrunken unused limbs or body parts that have developed to perform other tasks. Here are two examples of these:

1. Human design from Disney Pixars Wall-e. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/2012/05/17/approaching-wall-e-with-hondas-uni-cub-personal-mobility-device/

2. H.G Wells sketch of the man of year million. http://davidszondy.com/future/man/man_million.htm

3. Horse and Sea creature combined. http://newpagebooks.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/creature-of-month-hippocampus-sea-horse.html

4. Mud skipper resting on a river bank. http://www.studentsoftheworld.info/sites/animals/shadows.php

5. Snake with small arms. http://kewananehjmbh.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/evolution-legged-snake-found-in-china.html

Professional Character Concept Introduction

This part of the module is professional character conception and goes through the process of concepting a character in 2D and finally modelling and texturing that character in 3D to a professional standard.

The project requires two characters one low poly (600 tris) and a higher poly (6000 tris). These tri counts would be similar to a PS1 character and an early PS2 character model.

 Low poly

I like to model in low poly and the designs of good low poly characters is something I can admire more than a next gen high resolution character model. Low poly models can have a charming quality about them as often elements of that character will be oversize or cartoonish, just look at most ps1 or Nintendo 64 era games.

For some inspiration and understanding of low poly character designs it may be usefull to look at games such as Crash bandicoot, Spryo the dragon, ect.

 http://mestarstudios.deviantart.com/art/Crash-Bandicoot-109456711, MeStarStudios

http://uk.ign.com/images/games/spyro-the-dragon-ps-3920/4fa6c969cdc388ed13e3c44c. IGN

High poly

Although 6000 tris is not considered that high poly in today’s game technology it would have been around the time of the first ps2 titles. Most games in 2002-2003 would have characters around the 6000 tri mark. An example of how poly limits have changed is that in 2007 the character head models alone in Crysis would be around the 6000 tri count.

For this tri limit I wanted to do a completely different sort of style character and since theres more polys to play with I could attempt a more semi realistic design over the cartoony and exaggerated features of what I intend to do on the low poly model.

 

Concept of characters in 2d

When it comes to concepting characters there are thousands of ways and styles that artist adopt. Me myself I find that drawing a silhouette of a character with little to no detail then when I’m happy drawing line art over the silhouette and finally adding colour works best for me. However this project would be a great chance to explore some other techniques that I may find other artists use.

Evolution theme in character designs

Some initial ideas for character that have some link with my chosen evolution and genetics theme:

·         A character not necessarily humanoid having shrunken limbs due to the fact they aren’t used anymore.

·         Taking a creature from the world today and putting them in a different environment and designing how that change of habitat may affect them.

Time for a update...

Over the last two weeks I have been coming up with a theme which I will apply to four assignments, which are:

Game conception
Character conception
Level Design
Environment Design

To generate a theme I first began with four starting points which cover a lot of topics and ideas. Religion, Politics, Science and the World seemed like good starting points to begin to expand and find a theme. Below is part of the process I went about generating themes.

A area that really caught my attention sprouted off science, more importantly the genetics section. I felt that there is so much to cover under genetics not just science wise but the social and religious implications that follow it.

At this point I had to general themes I could go down, benefit of genetic understanding such as altering DNA to improve the human body and some themes that this could create and the other being genetic mutation which fit in with evolution.

After several discussions with classmates and some thought into how I could apply both these themes to the four assignments I choose the mutation path but focusing on evolution as I thought the designs would be both challenging but relativity unexplored.

So I began to research evolution.

Welcome to my blog.

The posts here are for the Games Proposal XB3001 module for my third and final year of the BA Hons Game Design course which I am studying at Futureworks.

Updates to follow shortly...