For this assignment I was in group F, alongside (in Animation), Cloe Malard-Fowler, Tim Vogan, Leon Moody and Jodie Mccrudden, as well as (in Games Design), Paulina Grubyte, Daniel Pradzynski, Fabien McAllister, Ethan Morton, JJ Burke and Niall Dunlop. My primary role was Art Direction and Character Modelling.
In the Beginning
At the start of this assignment, after being segmented into groups with the Games Design course, I really enjoyed ideating in smaller groups. Jodie, Ethan, Daniel and I came up after a short while with the idea of a retro-futuristic sci-fi platformer featuring a very glamorous woman or drag queen astronaut who got left behind by the rest of her crew in deep space and had to find her way back to the space ship.
I was very keen on this idea. I have an interest in mid-century aesthetics that I would have loved to explore further and apply to my coursework. When we got back to our main group and discussed the ideas we had come up with while segmented we fell quite quickly between this idea and another with a central pair consisting of a girl and her dragon in a naturalistic fantasy world on a quest to restore magic to their world. The dragon would have magical shape-shifting abilities and would turn itself into a bow for the girl to use in game. I was well into my Pinterest board for the former idea when, after feedback, we decided on the latter.
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/JoshG762/lost-in-space/
Having worked on a naturalistic fantastical project in semester one, I initially contested this settlement, but it really wasn’t long before I started yet another Pinterest board for this other idea and started to get in the mind set for it. I found the work of an artist called Ma-ko that struck me as having the right tone for this idea. Their lush, illustrative environments and armed characters clad in colours complimentary to their surroundings were so inspiring to me that I won myself over on the idea upon seeing them.
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/JoshG762/dragons-and-dungeons/
Beyond this, the games ‘The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’ and the Moebius-influenced ‘Sable’ provided great visual reference. At this point we were intent on using some sort of cel shader to bring more style to the game, and these two games suggested to us by Eoghain were key starting points.
Above: Sable’s art style compared to that of Moebius.
Above: screenshots from Breath of the Wild.
Character Design
Since we had three in our group with art direction/character modelling roles assigned to them we wanted to come up with a third character beyond the girl and her dragon so that we could all have the chance of fulfilling our roles more fully. The third character we thought of was initially the spirit of a fallen soldier who serves as a guide and checkpoint marker for the main characters. Below are some exploratory sketches I did before characters were assigned- at this point Tim had made it known that he wanted to work on the dragon and it was up to Jodie and myself to decide between the girl and the guardian.
My initial ideas for the spirit were perhaps obvious but necessary to have out of my system to be able to progress. For the girl I mostly referenced Link and Wirt from ‘Over the Garden Wall’ and aimed for something whimsical and leaning towards androgynous.
Above is a more refined version of some of my sketches for the guardian, incorporating an emissive blue mist coming from his waist. At this point we had discussed magic being represented by the colour blue. Below is the next and final design I contributed for the guardian. I tried for something a lot more enigmatic, mystical and figurative in this design and I found myself very pleased with this interpretation of the character. After the completion of this thought it was decided between Jodie and myself that I would pursue the girl character and she would work on the guardian.
I worked on compiling a style reference sheet on PureRef including a lot of what we had talked about. I have mentioned Breath of the Wild, and here included ‘Slime Rancher 2’ which Cloe introduced me too and was using as reference for prop and environment work, as well as ‘Brave’ (2012) and ‘Kena: Bridge of Spirits’. I started yet another Pinterest board here too.
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/JoshG762/saphir/
At a certain point I was asked to create a placeholder design for the girl character for one of our early presentations. The below image is what I came up with. For the most part I looked to Link and his clothes for inspiration here, including a tunic and trousers tucked into her boots. At the time I was pleased with this design, but on reflection it comes across as a bit too NPC for a main character; that said, it was a crucial step in the design process and a lot of elements from this design either got carried over or served as inspiration for later iterations.
Having this base done, I began considering more types of clothing and silhouettes, taking into consideration her character and her environment. We knew she was a sort of nomad, and I involved her being a hunter and an archer, bearing in mind that she would have access to leather and that she would need to have some level of camouflage. I also knew she was the descendant of an ancient elf-like race, and that Niall (narrative design) suggested she display some of their characteristics in the form of short elven ears to parallel her ancestor’s longer ones.
I took inspiration from various sources with these designs, for example Nyssa from ‘Doctor Who’ (see below), who was from a very lush planet called Traken. In applying this sort of petal skirt to our character I found it read too young and too gender-specific. Since she is a nomad it wouldn’t have made sense for her to wear gendered clothing since she would have no reference for it beyond what scraps remain of the former society. What’s more, having a hunter dress like a toddler in a princess costume is the kind of contrast I definitely wanted to avoid.
Also of note is my inspiration for designs 3 and 4, which was primarily Legolas and elves from the Lord of the Rings films (see below). I was sure that this didn’t suit the character either. I thought these designs edged on uniform and militaristic aesthetics- they implied that she was a very solemn character as opposed to the lively personality I had in mind for her.
I settled on design 2 since it combined familiar and modern elements, yet altered them enough so they looked unique. Furthermore, with this design I kept in mind the idea that she was nomadic, and as such would be making her own clothes, i.e. it makes more sense for her garments to be less fitting. The cropped jacket I thought of as a puffer coat in how it kept its shape and found some good examples that helped inspire me.
By way of the trousers I thought of plus fours (which were typically sportswear associated with game shooters), but also came across some Japanese work wear that became good reference for me.
I produced some studies of these trousers which benefited me when drawing the character later.
With all these ideas fresh in my mind I moved on to the development of this design in Procreate. For the colours I decided to pick from a border from an illuminated manuscript I came across in a book of border designs I have. I chose this one in particular because of its bright and harmonious colours and nature-themed flourishes. My first iteration of the colour scheme made heavy use of orange with the main accent being a blue under shirt. I liked this in theory, but in practice it wouldn’t be appropriate as any sort of camouflage, and it seems to infer that the character’s personality is fierce and intense, which is not at all what I was aiming for.
Seeing this design with fresh eyes I decided it gave me the impression of a black smith or some such, with her sharpened edges and heavy-duty gloves and boots.
With that, my next attempt was a lot more successful and came with some needed changes. I changed the hem of her jacket to be scalloped, as in an image I found of an elf in costume, which was a lot more appropriate. I figured since she lives among nature that any pattern she incorporated into her dress would have to be connected to something she would find in her environment- that being petals in this case. I used this thinking on the flaps, for lack of a better word, on her boots which represent leaves, finding good inspiration for this on Pinterest. Her colour scheme changed dramatically too as I decided to make us of subtler, more muted earth tones with blue and lilac accents that better represent her humble personality and that could serve well enough as camouflage. I decided to get rid of her gloves too since as an archer she’d need full dexterity, switching them for the leather arm wraps which featured in other designs.
I took my consideration of colour a step further here and researched natural dyes so as to find out what colours she would be capable of making herself, as well as connecting that to colour theory so I could better exemplify her self through her costume. Through this research I also found that natural dyes fade quite quickly in the sun, which informed my texturing later.
On presenting this design I got good feedback, and a suggestion from Henry that I could incorporate some of the patterns and flourishes of the border design into her costume in some way, so in her turnaround I added some representational designs on her trousers, using Cloe’s tree models as partial reference, as though she’s using excess dye to paint her surroundings on her clothes. I also warmed up the orange of the trousers which I just thought worked better.
With the design complete I produced some movement drawings to indicate to Leon, our animator and rigger, how she might look in motion.
See below: some further thoughts on style, face, eyes and the possibility of some pigment on her face.
Modelling
Initially I had planned to sculpt my character in either Blender or Z Brush and got so far as a blockout, but on hearing this Henry told me I could work from base meshes to save time and retop, and so I ended up using a combination of that provided to us and those in Maya’s content library.
Henry also introduced me to Maya’s sculping tools which, although not ideal for detailed work, made for the results I wanted when used on the base meshes. The trousers, for example, were made by using the inflate tool and editing vertexes to push the mesh in where the belt would be tied.
It was again Henry who showed me how to achieve what I wanted by way of the boot flaps by using the quad draw tool. This was incredible to me as I didn’t know that tool could be used for anything beyond retopology.
I also made sure to create an overhang where the boots are tucked into the trousers to eliminate any harsh lines and make the transition from boot to trouser more seamless.
The shirt was easy to achieve by extruding the faces in the areas it needed to show. Using the higher poly base mesh worked in my favour here since it left a slightly jagged edge as I had in my design. I later deleted faces that weren’t seen under the jacket
The jacket was more complicated. I started with the low poly female base mesh from Maya’s content library to get more even results, leaving just the top half of the torso. I extruded the edges at the shoulder and brought them down to make the conical shapes of the sleeves.
The scalloped hems of the jacket proved problematic at first. Texture maps were suggested to me, but as I wanted a thickness to the fabric that wasn’t quite appropriate. I found a solution to this problem after posting my problem to Reddit, where it was suggested to me that I add geometry to the edges of the sleeve and edit the verts accordingly. This gave me the results I wanted.
The arm wraps proved a lot easier than I thought they’d be.
I used the above tutorial as a starting point and edited it as I needed to to fit her arm.
Her satchel changed a bit from her design in translating it to 3D. I pondered an easy way to fasten a bag that she would be able to achieve with her resources, and came across ammunition pouches from WW1 which had a metal knob, over and under which a small hole in the bag would sit and keep it closed. It was also brought to my attention that the dragon, now called Siz, would be able to climb into the bag, and so I didn’t want to make a mechanism that was difficult to animate.
One downside of the base mesh method was the difficulty that came with having to stylise the face. I was getting frustrated with this element of the model when Henry reminded me that there’s always going to have to be some compromise when translating 2D to 3D.
see below: without (left) and the beginnings of (right) stylisation.
That said, I think I achieved what I wanted in the face, and got her to a place that resembles my artwork well..
And here she is turning around:
And UVed.
And with a test in Unreal, I was ready to texture.
Texturing
In texturing I utilised a tutorial Cloe had shared on creating stylised textures with baked lighting. This took me a while to get the hang of, but once I had I started getting the results I wanted.
To get the glyph (meaning ‘Hero’) debossed into her pendant, I brought an alpha I had created in Photoshop into Substance- which is something else I am grateful to Henry for showing me.
Above are the final textures.
The week we had guests from local game studios I got good feedback from all who saw my Substance file which was very encouraging. In particular, Lauren Bell from Rocket Flair Studios was very enthusiastic about my work, commenting on its originality amidst other aspects.
There was an issue I had to deal with where I had about 20 texture sets and was told that is too difficult to implement. Thankfully Paulina introduced me to IDs, so I added new lamberts to groups of my mesh representing clothes, skin and hair, made smart materials out of all my textures and applied them under the new texture sets. It went from around 20 to 3 which was a great learning moment for me.
I came up with the name Saphir (or Saph) for this character around this point. As the German word for sapphire it connects to the blue magic of the world. I also thought it sounded nice with her companion’s name, Siz.
Further 2D Work
Beyond the character I was to contribute some 2D illustrations which would serve as murals in-game based on descriptions provided by Niall. For the game as a whole there would have been four, but because of the abridged version we were aiming for I only planned to do one.
See below the description of this mural from Niall:
‘A depiction of the Aos Si living their daily lives. they all stand at the same level; nobody is depicted above or below eachother.
Standing in the centre of the mural are three priests, appearing to be deep in serious discussion. Around them are caretakers, working at different trades. some tending to flowers, some passing out loaves of bread, maybe even carving things out of stone or weaving tapestry.on the outside of this crowd, at both sides, there are soldiers standing at attention. their weapons are sheathed.’
The description of the Clerics in the centre:
‘They wear white robes, accented with gold and blue. They are adorned in jewels that range widely in colour, worn as rings, bracelets and necklaces.This is the only caste that wears jewelry. Clerics have their hair braided, some may decorate their hair with flowers. This caste were the religious and political leaders of the Aos Si, deciphering prophecies, convening with spirits and meditating on important decisions.’
And of the Soldiers:
‘Lower ranking soldiers wear a brass cuirass, and have ring piercing in their upper lobe.
the mid-ranked Officers will wear an orbital ring piercing in addition to the upper lobe. They will wear brass pauldrons in addition to the cuirass.’
Visually I was most inspired by the illustrations of Russian artist Ivan Bilibin, who illustrated Russian folklore and fairy tales utilising flat colours and ornate borders. I also thought of the border that inspired Saphir’s colour palette and the patterns on her trousers.
Some of my other references and inspirations can be found through my main Pinterest board.
See below the sketch for this piece, the piece itself, the border on its own and a timelapse.
