Week Sixteen

This week I have made the decision to pursue the hardened character as the one I want to go forward with modelling, as I believe it'd be a useful opportunity to sculpt all those exaggerated, chunky muscles for my first time with zBrush. I've also been compiling reference images for the general look of both characters - their colours, clothing and faces, seeing as only have their overall shape at the moment. For these references I have been looking at suitably stylised sources, such various animated movies, along video game art from World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2.

Here are a few of the best images I could find for the type of aesthetic I'm going for - strong, stylised shapes, chunky with plenty of colour, and a large size difference between the two. If you've seen "Wreck-It Ralph", you'll know what i mean when I say that I want these two to have a "Ralph and Venellope" dynamic - constantly at odds with each other - the big is always begrudgingly looking after the smaller character, who is always being hyperactive or reckless! I think this is my primary source of inspiration for these two personalities - they compliment each other really well, but without fundamentally changing who they are as individuals. They work both alone and as a package deal.

Here's where the work actually starts! I've begun to visualise the "Hardened" character's final appearance in the form of a set of orthographics, which should prove useful down the line when sculpting. To create these, I started out with a similar set of images as examples, and then slowly chipped away/added parts to turn it into the same character we know from my silhouette set! The orthos I started with were of the "Pyro" class character in Team Fortress 2, as I really liked the stylised shapes the trousers formed. After completing a basic solid black front/side set, I then went on to further visualise the details such as facial structure, hair, clothing and muscle definition, at the same time making sure that all the features were horizontally aligned in both stances. I was very happy with the results, and it brings me one step closer to modelling!

I then conducted some colour experimentation with the final designs - I played with the character's hair colour, ethnicity and fashion sense to boot. Although I was very fond of the top-right design with the dark skin and purple-gold combo, I decided that skin of a lighter shade would be more faithful to the world that I built around the character in the character creation matrix. I eventually chose the pale ginger in the top-center as his complexion reminded me of tough mountain-dwellers, such as the Nords in the Elder Scrolls series.