Category: Character Creation 2nd Year

Art Style breakdown exercise

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These brief style breakdowns were made with Padraig Toquillo

Hi-Fi Rush 

  1. Rhythm game fans, younger children ages 12-15 (based on marketing and very light-hearted artstyle), many action shots seem taken out of comic book panels and the characters throughout being very light-hearted trying to create a fun game to play with music for children
  2. Influences include comic books and recent animated films such as into the spider-verse, using Ben-day dots across their backgrounds to give it a more comic feel. Also using high contrasted comic colours and action lines, Influenced by anime as well throughout the gameplay via poses, some character archetypes often within anime. Based on the song choices it seems to take influence for character design from many cyber-punk style games/shows/comics that are typically used by this genre we can see the effect on the character designs with neon lights and cybernetics incorporated into their designs. (tri gun stampede is an obvious influence for character design) use rocker designs for its characters (dramatic hair, bandanas, scarves, leather jackets ect)

       Point that was originall missed Constructed with cell shading that is mostly flat colouring with some small shadows and is 2 tone uses half shading on background and single tones to not distract from the characters who are already limited in colouring and shading the background

       are also mostly clean colouring  

  1. High saturated art style, and fast-moving shots and action lines create an energetic and upbeat feeling for the player. As well as trying to empower the character. 
  2. The art style compliments the fast-paced action and songs by being energetic (see soundtrack list) and works well to incorporate multiple genres to fit together. Being light-hearted, it conveys the comedic tone and doesn’t make the silly moments feel out of place 
  3. It knows its audience very well and goes all in on its style which could turn some people away however, it blends action and rhythm game genres together very well creating a fun experience 
  4. Use cell shading, use actions line, Use ben Dot, Keep vibrant colouring, Dynamic posing and also looking at referencing pop culture with them, use fps to emphasis cut scenes, Bold colouring and vfx for attacks.

 

9 animated movie  

1.It is aged 12 however, it uses a lot more mature themes which targets a more older audience 

2.The movie’s art style took a lot of inspiration from steampunk aesthetics and the Tim Burton style, as the shots have the characters positioned down in frame to make them feel powerless and small. It also takes the lighting from Tim Burton as throughout the film, the light has a de-saturated colour scheme, with a green tint on the lighting to reflect the grim atmosphere. Cartoony art styles. There’s also some supernatural elements with the green lighting reflecting otherworldly and unnatural aspects in the story 

  1. Horror and a feeling of discomfort. And uses shots to immediate the audience by using saturation and tint on the characters. 
  2. The story follows an uncertain character walking up in a ruined world and trying to learn who he was and what happened. The artstyle aids this by unverving the audience and making the main character feel small by having many props be oversized. The washed-out colour creates a bleak atmosphere
  3. It can look muddied due to its colouring style unlike products with a similar style such as box trolls, but It does do a good job of creating intimidation as it leaves no room for comedy or light hearted moments. 
  4. Use green lighting while modelling texturing so you know how the model will look in the final product, use washed out colours, pallete of browns and greens, when thinking about character design shape language plays an important role.
  5. Everything in world is hard surfaces for the most part, steam punk city aesthetic for backgrounds 

 

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild  

  1. 15 but expands to young adult primarily due to franchising and making shots similar to artwork intended to be viewed as atmospheric  
  2. Ocean horn is an obvious heavy influence, but also games like final fantasy, shadow of colossus is another big influence however BOTW maintains a softer style that is kept light hearted and less dark than shadow of the colossus
  3. Keeps influences from previous Zelda games while creating a softer tone and uses illustrative designs, takes influence from fantasy games such as ocean horn, wonder within the viewer, Uses cell shading that does not have line art in more atmospheric scenes is 3 tone and in harsher lighting its 2 tone. 
  4. It helps the player want to explore, which is one of the main aspects of the game. It also creates a mystical feeling to the world, helps empower the player keeping the world feel like a fantasy, as the character get stronger it becomes a power fantasy
  5. It has a much higher illustrative quality to its models than games of similar styles, the style can take away from more serious story elements within the game because its very light-hearted and evokes childlike wonder, however this does fit most of the games tone, keeps sadder moments more balanced and light hearted which lets them target a younger audience.
  6. Hand-painted textures, Use of clean colour palettes, Flat texturing for assets, keep colours within the same saturation for the most part. 
  7. Very clean cell shading that in dark places is 3 tone and in brighter seems 2 tone with no outlines, this variety allows the game to create different tones

I wish I could have dove deeper in these analysis and looked at more technical elements of the creation of art style but on realising this I will do that in the future

Process of Character Creation

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Refining idea/Idea brief

My idea was to create a deadknight that had been reanimated, I wanted to leave parts of the spirit and armour missing to emphaisis how they may have died

Modelling

I started with simple sculpts and poly modeling to find the shape language I wanted before later refining it down

I ended up not using the shield and helmet because I didnt like how it blurred the shilluotte of the model the helmet was dropped for a gambison hood which was often worn under armour

During most of my model I poly modelled the armour around a sculpted base mesh of the upper torso to get the shapes I wanted it wasnt until the hand and face I used a combination of retropology and modelling off of a reference sheet which I quickly sketched for that purpose

I later tweaked it the vertices to form better retropology and get the look I wanted

I had wanted to use Zbrush and did trial it for abit but due to getting the licence late I didnt have much time to get used to it so after abit of practice modelling stuck with blender

Refinement

Feedback

  • there are some deformation on the armor on the left side. you will need to adjust the UVs to avoid these distortions.
  • The arms seem too small and short for a character like this. I understand that one of the arm is ghostly. I recommend you turn it into bones or a zombie-like arm to keep your character consistent. Focus on getting the volume to communicate the character’s nature/story a bit better.
  • the split between the human and ghostly head is too sharp. I recommend you sculpt the gradient between skin/bone. You can do this by purely sculpting scars and decayed flesh or a combination between sculpting details on the mesh and complementing them with materials in substance.
  • The hood looks from the front but could be enhanced to look less spherical and more like stiched medieval hood
  • regarding the armour you can look into adding more details do break the silhouette and add more forms on the armour, I highly recommend that you research and look up armour and reflect on the detail

Modelling changes, my main changes were to fix problematic mesh issues but I also added rivets following references and straps for the main plate parts, and to address the issue of the back of the model being flat I moved the currupted parts of the armour to face more directions and basic wear to other parts of the armour besides the currupted part

Feedback on multi-res issue

I fixed my multi-res issue by duplicating the multi-res and applying the base layer then lowering the new one and adding more detail, since due to a very low poly base mesh I hadnt been able to add as much detail without higher levels

New model

I used alot of what I learned last term with substance and was intially going to go for the same stylised hand painted textures using different filters but this time decided to go for a more realistic texturing style as I hadnt tried to achieve it before, so I looked at depictions of armour I liked to use as a reference

I created edge wear shown here on the base colours tab using a metal wear filter and anchor layer to draw where I wanted the wear primarily because I wanted to lessen the amount on the right side to not take away from the look of the left

I wanted to creat a mix of depth so using height maps and hsl layers in combination with textures I created dark, medium, and light duplicates on an offset with different roughnesses to add detail to the armour

I repeated similar steps for the Gambison and Leather straps one, using anchor layers to control the stitches as using seems or normals created a double stick look I didnt like

One thing I wish I had done through the texturing was add textures to the stiches an the dirt to acompany the wear on the armour

Assembling my Unreal Engine Scene

After finding models and starting to mess around with compisition from a walled gravesite I quickly realised I wanted to make some form of ringed grave

While playing around with the default skybox I realised it wasnt going to be able to achieve what I wanted and another classmate told me about a better skybox that had far more options

Using goodsky and Expential fog height I created one I liked far more, I also realised I didnt just want the grave in a flat landscape with some background hills and like the idea of raising it up

Fog Shaders

Intially I created the horizontal fog walls far differently but the effect felt off alongside the volumetric fog so instead I created seperate instances of the material and edited them

Original shader for textures fog I liked how it looked moving but not still

I think they looked odd next to each other and the fog wall overshadowed the sky

Material and instances (not how I format them fore myself just so they can be seen in one screenshot)

Animated fog walls

Volumetric Fog

Ghostly Shader

I put my render into photoshop but the fog messed up alot of my layer, so I ended up just using one that captured the foreground and one that captured the ghostly textures to enhance those

Final Render

 

References I used throughout development

Videos I used throughout the process of my model

 

Overall, I really enjoyed most of the project; however, I struggled a lot with motivation towards the end, which wasn’t improved by quite a few external issues I had come up with during the project; I hope to improve where I can on this. Parts I was pleased with were the modelling and initial texturing; During the modelling, I had alot of fun learning about sculpting anatomy and modelling while enhancing my shape language; however, while I still used sculpting and retropology, I think I had an overreliance on poly-modelling, one of my weaknesses was UV-unwrapping I think from now on I need to be more thorough while checking my UV unwraps. However, I definitely improved a lot while figuring out how to use UDIMs within Blender, Unreal Engine and Substance Painter. One of the things I enjoyed most about modelling was adding in small details to improve the character.
My texturing couldve been improved alot more with some simple things such as adding dirt and grime to the armour to help improve the narrative and accompany the wear already on the armour, my main issue is that I could have pushed it alot further in Unreal Engine with animated textures and utilising lighting on the the metalic textures more. I also put too much detail that ended up not being seen in the final result, to improve this I should draft up concept images for what the viewer will see earlier in my pipeline, which will avoid time being
Learning Unreal Engine was super enjoyable, especially getting to see how it’s used in film and TV and all the really helpful tools within it, such as quixel bridge and assembling a landscape and scene.
Overall, I am happy with my work on this assignment except for a few things, such as struggling to model the face how I wanted, but primarily, I struggle with working to a schedule, which I’m getting better at.