Week twenty four can men only one thing - moving on to the next character! This week it's Caliban, the fish-like undering to the great wizard Prospero. At this point project Brandon has already started modelling Prospero and Ariel in zBrush - a good idea to get them done as early as possible in my opinion, since he's the only one modelling two characters! The level is starting to come together in-engine with a tessellating ocean effect, which animates with the help of overlaid normal maps. It's all still looking a little artificial and is yet to properly "click" but it's still early days.
And here he is! The way in which I'm presenting this design slightly differs to the last two weeks as Brandon never did a design for Caliban, effectively giving me full freedom for his appearance. For this concept, I decided to use a look that was somewhat similar to that of the character in the 2011 film The Tempest, with some obvious tweaks. Though he's clearly kept his neanderthal physique, he's often mistaken for a fish in the play, so I saw this as an opportunity to add this aquatic aspect to his design. As you can see, he now possesses a webbed claw in place of each hand, something I based closely on the visuals from the zany creatures in Cabin in the Woods. I kept the colour pallets relatively in-keeping with the scene that we've set in our style guide - I've adorned him with a bronze and purple belt/corset type item, which conceals his midriff and keeps his sack cloth pants up, it's something that I like to think Prospero gave him for his role as a servant. Everything else that he wears suggest a life of hardship and survival on the isolated island that he calls home - rags and bandages, things that could have easily just been stolen from the corpses of dead pirates or "unfortunate" explorers. I also made an additional "side-on" view for the reference plane, as I found that this greatly helped when sculpting my "Hardened Brute" last month.
On top of all this designing I've been doing, I've also had to prepare for the formative presentations about our dichotomous characters. In aid of this, I've put together a poster showcasing my character in an action pose to show off his violent personality. This poster will accompany the final slide of my presentation so that it has the best impact possible (this was also advised in Chris' lecture on the topic of our presentations). In order to create this poster, I (badly) rigged the Hardened Brute in 3DS Max, took a few screenshots from various angles, and then performed some tweaks in Adobe Photoshop, such as removing tears and twist marks on the skin caused by the haphazardly lat-minute rigging process. I also edited his eyes to make him look as if he were locking eye-line with the audience, and finally added text, a shadow and a blurred-out background for some cheap depth of field. The end result should more than suffice for the final slide of my powerpoint presentation!