Project Start

 04-05/10/21 - Week 1

To start off this year, I focused on planning out firstly which briefs I wanted to take and then how to approach them from a realistic and, hopefully, reasonable pace. I decided to chose the Ubisoft 3D character project - The Captain, and the Playground art test - Fruit Cart. I felt that these played to some of my strengths but also gave me room to be a bit more creative and show off some of my skills.

Here is my very base plan, I need to flesh this out a bit more and add some pointers in for myself to avoid disaster later down the line. This base also doesn't include some of the weeks we have over Christmas before hand in. This is mainly because my resources at home are not as good as the ones I can access whilst I can be on campus, so I don't want to rely on this time period too much.

As I have chosen to take these projects one at a time, I picked the character brief to move on with first. I started by thinking about a theme I wanted to select, I wanted to do something to do with the sea but I was a bit put off choosing a more common theme of a pirate captain. Instead I chose a fishing captain which I thought was a really fun idea to design and flesh out,

Here is my first moodboard which mainly revolved around thinking about the outfit for the character, one of my main inspirations for this was May from Guilty Gear as I thought that she has a lot of the design aspects that I wanted to echo in my own work - such as the clarity of the ship and sea connection and also the oversized parts of the outfit.

I also wanted to include a logo somewhere on the design to refer back to story for the character and give it a bit more flesh and believability - to look more into this I found some interesting boat logos or fishing logos in general.

Lastly, I needed to look at the style that I wanted for the character. I initially was thinking semi-realism but I think I am going to go a bit more stylised for this project. I found some examples of the style I am thinking about and also noted down some of the aspects that I mainly wanted to take from this mood board. This is the smoothness of the face and body structure and the slight exaggeration of those features as well. I was also planning to have a few fantasy features on my character so I thought the slightly more stylised style would help.

From my moodboards I started getting into the design of my character, I wanted something fun, playful and had some storytelling elements. My main idea was the fish hat so I included that in all my sketches and eventually got to a design that I felt was what I had in my head. I didn't want to spend too long on the design since these projects are rather fast paced and I want to get the quality of the character in 3D the best that I possibly can instead of focusing on design itself.

I thought that the fish hat really helped to encourage the idea that she is a captain and I used the nets, ropes, buoys and waders along with a yellow coat that I found to really influence the fishing aspect of the design. Obviously, the rod also helps here but I wanted this for a more storytelling part as I feel it adds a lot more of the fun character I wanted to portray.

I think I will end up making a finalised design with possibly a few changes to get the silhouette a bit more clear and also work on colour so I can quickly move into zbrush.

Overall, I think I am making good progress currently. I am somewhat worried to move into 3D as I have not used zbrush in a while so it will be a test to see how much I remember and how quick I can get moving further into this project.