BA3a - Week 11 Summary

This week I started finalising the boss design. Feedback I had received in the presentation pointed out that my boss creature looked like he was leaning over and it was taking away from the overall design. I thus decided to firstly looked at changing the designs pose and positioning of the limbs. The left is the original design and the right is the altered one, which I feel looks far more feasible and he actually looks like he is realistically holding his own weight. 

I then moved on to the model sheet for the design. Below are the sketches I started with, lineart and the finished designs.

This is one of my favourite designs overall, with a kind of guardian of the woods aesthetic but more sci-fi orientated to fit my theme. It was a lot more difficult to rotate to show the different sides of the creature as it is less inspired by existing animals like the others, and more my own creation so I had to myself figure out what was happening in each area. It was a fun challenge however and I feel like each pose conveys mostly what I envisioned. The side view was especially hard as I couldn't quite get my head around the electricity antlers and the form of the body itself, and I'm still not sure I like how it turned out but otherwise I am pleased with this design.

I moved on then to one of the monster model sheets. The robot monster is a design I am still not sure on so I'm pushing that to the back and focused on the dog design.

I am very pleased with how this design turned out. When colouring it, the idea was that its form is only revealed by surrounding lights. The tail and paws/claws would be used to entice the prey, resembling food or something similar. It would be essentially glitching in and out of existence. Similar to with the cat the dogs paws/claws and tail are a computer data glitch. I found this design quite difficult to recreate in each pose as I wanted to keep the doglike anatomy whilst pushing the front paws further. I don't think I quite managed to portray how large I wanted the front paws to be but in some angles it didn't make sense and the dog may not have been able to move properly, so I would have to work further with the anatomy of the design to work certain features further. Overall however I do like how this came out. 

Here are the references I used for the dog model sheet:

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When showing my work to Merlin he gave some feedback and told me to try to desaturate the deer body to help the heads pop more. Below is the desaturated version versus the normal version.

Desaturated

Saturated

I feel like the desaturated version looks a lot better and help the colours of the heads draw your eye first. I also didn't realise quite how orange the deer looked before too as I'd only been working on it in my laptop so when I got on the uni computer it was way more saturated than I expected.

We also had two lectures from Jake Gumbleton, a Games Artist, who talked to us about his career in the industry thus far. He also had another lecture where he went through peoples work and gave critique. I submitted task 3, the paintover of the mannequin lady. He gave advice about the colour composition, saying that the background ends up taking away from the characters clothes especially as a lot of the colours are muddy. He also said to work on the shadows, and practice hands, but I know the hands were bad as I tried to draw over the mannequins hand. If I get time I would like to try and push the piece further, but because its a task I do not have time for it currently.