Digital Reflective Journal #7

This week I was able to finalise the design and colour pallet of my character. I did this by taking the rough turn around sheet that I had made into Illustrator and recreated the line work using vector art. This then allowed me the freedom to easily experiment with the colours until I was happy with the design. For the head of the character, I ended up using a colour pallet that was very indicative of the D&D character that I had loosely based the character’s narrative off. For the rest of the body however I used colours that were more typical for an insect such as brown for the flesh and dark blue for the carpus. There was a point however where it was very difficult to decide between having brownish orange flesh or green flesh as both fit the character. In the end I went with the brown colour as the character was already fairly vibrant.

Outside of this I also did a drawing workshop where we drew models, a walk cycle workshop where we explored animating a walk cycle, as well as a pixel are workshop for making sprite sheets. For all of these I found them fairly interesting however I didn’t attend many of the puppet making workshops as I already knew how to sculpt with armatures and didn’t need to make a puppet as I was going to make my character in blender.

On the subject of this, I finished the week with a Maya sculpting workshop. Going in to this I had mixed feeling as whilst I wanted to learn and engage with Maya, I had already started to sculpt my character in blender as Maya’s sculpting tools are the weakest part of the program. However, to my surprise the session was the most enjoyable of the week as we spent most of it nerding out about CGI and talked a lot about why people don’t really use Maya for sculpting because of all its short comings in that area.

Overall, I made a lot of progress this week towards my project and finally got onto the modelling stage of my character which is what I had been looking forward to.