BA3a - Week 2 Summary

This week started with the presentation, which went well and it seemed like I had set myself a good amount of work to do, plus the stretch goal if I use my time well. I then started researching and silhouetting my pet designs. MMO games often have very varied designs for things like pets and mounts, as they want to cater to everyone's needs and they don't have to actually make sense in the lore or logic a lot of the time. For example in FFXIV you can get things like a baby chocobo as a pet, and a fat chocobo as a mount, and also get a tiny boat as a pet and a throne to fly around in. I think that's why I wanted to focus on MMO game creatures because they can just be designed for fun.

Below are the silhouettes made for the pets:

Some are inspired by real animals, others by other things like food or toys, and others are just what came to mind when sketching. I then picked some of my favourites and drew them more detailed as seen below:

With these I'm going to narrow it down and then pick two from them. I somewhat regret doing it like this as its a very slow process, and with the mounts/monsters I will try to do it differently. There are a couple from these designs that I think would make good mounts so I might play around with them.

We also had our first session with Kaleigh working in Alchemy and Photoshop. We first had to make an environment using Alchemy, and then we brought it into Photoshop and used photobashing and layer masks to create an environment piece from it. Below is my attempt:

I had some issues with my tablet in this session as the older wacom drivers seem to have stopped working, so most of this piece was done using a mouse. I think if I was able to use my tablet for this, it would have turned out significantly better, but with what little time had plus using a mouse for almost all of it, I am relatively happy with the outcome. If I had more time I would have used more photos and drawn more, working with the colours too as a lot of the rocks look terribly out of place.