To prepare to start with this assignment, we are creating a character that will fit the theme that we will choose from the environment options that the course lecturer has provided. There are roughly twenty environments available for us to choose from, and few of them have caught my interest and given me an overview of what I imagine my character would look like. The character “Tuan Zi” from the Chinese cartoon “Boonie bears: A Mystical Winter,” which I had previously viewed, gave me the inspiration for my initial concept, which was a bear and deer-like creature. When I first saw Tuan Zi, I believed it was a chubby deer, but it’s a bear. Using Tuan Zi as a template, I drew a very rough sketch of my initial concept, incorporating features from a few settings that grabbed my attention, including Watermills, Dreamscape: Stylized Environment Tower – Stylized Nature Open World Fantasy, and the abandoned hospital. The abandoned hospital gave me the idea of sick, ill, and zombie diseases, then combined with the forest element that all three of them have. I thought of a bear character that was affected by the plant disease and gradually transformed into a tree, or more accurately, trees and plants are growing out of its body to replace some part of its body.
I looked up more bear reference photos and worked on drawing the bear’s structure and some of the expressions I wanted for my bear character.
As I worked on creating the bear character, I explored the Stylized-Nanite Dungeon as an alternative setting. I came up with another character idea, which was inspired by the character “Gollum” from the film “Lord of the Rings.” Observing him also made me think of hairless cats, so I combined the two and created a second design as a choice for my final creature design. Using the reference photos I discovered, I drew a few rough sketches of them both. When attempting to create this character, I began by choosing elements from Gollum and the hairless cats, that both have the least amount of hair. Gollum was a skin-covered skeleton, and his eyes were so large that they were on the verge of expanding that they formed the basis for my second creature concept.
After finishing both designs, I went to Henry to get his opinion because I wasn’t sure which one would be better to create as my final creature. He said it’s up to me to decide which of the two characters I want to build more. I ended up picking the bear because it has an adequate number of details, which I believe will help me learn how to use various tools and software while also improving my ability to create a challenging character. Henry’s suggestion of my bear creature was that the plant and trunk, which link to the bear body, should be more effectively blended so that the design doesn’t appear to be separate entities. He gave me a description of what I could do and recommended that I look at dryad creatures for references.
