Digital Reflective Journal #6

This week we started on our fourth project with a focus on antiheros. As such the workshops that we did reflected this in an effort to help us develop our character concepts further. The first thing that we did was a drawing workshop to help use improve our grasp on human anatomy. The main take away that I found from this workshop however was a website that provides poseable 3d models of humans for anatomical study. Such a website would have been very useful when I was trying to model a skeleton in blender as there was no uniform reference that I could find for all angles.

After this we did a group research session for character reference for our final designs. Whilst I thought that the group research was a good idea, I ended up not being as productive as I otherwise would have as I was often helping others rather than completing my own word and had to finish it on the following day.

We then did a series of character design workshops. The first one we did had a focus on presenting the characteristics of a character through its design. For this I decided to use the same characteristics that Kat was using and ended up with a Russian little girl who is the head of a clown secret police that forced people to be happy through violence. For the second workshop we focused more on developing a character for a narrative and shape language. For the narrative I made a girl and their adopted brother trying to connect with the McGuffin being a rainbow slinky. When we got onto the shape language however, I ended up making large skeleton with the personality of a shy gentle giant. For his design I used a lot of squares with rounded edges however some people ended up thinking that it was a robot instead. This was largely due to the fact that I didn’t get a chance to colour his armour so that his bones would be clearly distinctive.

Overall, I found both workshops to be really interesting and useful. However, I did find that as the workshops were designed for creating characters from scratch, and I already had a strong concept for a character that I wanted to use from the get go, it did feel wasteful to use said character for them. This is because I would have had less room to experiment within the workshop and miss out on learning certain processes. As a result of this, in the Illustrator workshop I tried to move myself closer to the actual concept that I had. I did this by instead of using my more refined characters from the workshops for the vector tracing process, I instead used a really ruff sketch that I had made at the beginning of the project. I then later stuck said sketch into my book and fully developed the design into my final concept for my character

For the final workshop this week I did a character modelling session in Maya. This however left me slightly conflicted in the direction of my project in terms of the tools that I am going to use. This is because despite having gotten fairly good at poly modelling in Maya, with me having done a personal commission for a UV mapped gas station, I don’t think that the program is as well suited for modelling characters as blender is. This is largely due to fact that making a base mesh is much quicker using metaballs and modifiers. Furthermore, the general consensus is that blender has better sculpting tools. Because of this I think that at the very least I will model the character in blender, treating it how Maya users would use Zbrush. I then may bring the model back into Maya for UV mapping and rigging which should be better in Maya.