P Number: 1322992x
Email: sarah.wright7@email.dmu.ac.ukProject Title: VS- Highly Stylised Character Project
Overview: To produce 12 stylised Nano-Pirate characters taking design cues for characters from ‘The Borrowers". A vehicle for these pirates also needed to be produced
The process for this included:
- Choosing a design style to work towards
- Sketching out initial characters for development
- Refining designs and making sure they all work together
- Rendering all of my characters to an intermediate level
- Producing promotional images
Moodboards:
For this project I knew what kind of style I wanted to work in so the initial moodboarding went by fairly quickly. It also helped to have a “key image” moodboard after my initial image gathering to refine my reference.
Looking at this now some characters went through a lot more ideation than others, whereas others I had a clear idea of how they would turn out from the thumbnail stage. Most of my characters designs just needed some tweaking as opposed to a complete overhaul. After the initial thumbnail stages I also checked and evaluated my characters against each other to make sure they worked as a crew in terms of their colour pallets, body shapes and overall demeanor, something I carried over from my last project. Though I could not evaluate as extensively as I did then as time did not allow it it was still a good practise to view them all in a line up. Certain characters also needed to work as small groups within the overall crew. The twin chefs with the cabin girl, and the swabbies needed to be identifiable as family.
Final Character Sheets:
Final Line up and Promotional images:
Evaluation Q&A
Q: How well did I manage my time
Besides losing the days I had planned to do promotional context images, to fix the designs of my captain ,carpenter and chefs Everything when according to plan time wise.
Q: Did my end result represent what I wanted for this project?
Definitely. I love how my characters turned out in the end, and they work together well in the lineup. I've enjoyed this project enough to want to continue it in my own time and really develop them in the context of a game.
Q: How well did I manage my time
Besides losing the days I had planned to do promotional context images, to fix the designs of my captain ,carpenter and chefs Everything when according to plan time wise.
Q: Did my end result represent what I wanted for this project?
Definitely. I love how my characters turned out in the end, and they work together well in the lineup. I've enjoyed this project enough to want to continue it in my own time and really develop them in the context of a game.
I met my main goal is to render all of my characters to a polished state so I can have a final character line-up. Though I did not have time to produce any promo images to put them into context. Condensing my design process down worked well for this project and was a good decision to make to adapt to the time constraints.
I enjoyed designing in this style and could see myself taking it further into my FMP, though I would need to further test to see if it works in terms of environments (something that would have been tested in promo images.
Q: Strengths I found during this project
The majority of my design decisions worked out for this project.I picked out a style that allowed me to produce characters quickly, but allowed me to skip some of my regular design processes (in response to the quantity of characters and time frame). Putting some of my characters in pairs and family groups really strengthen their overall designs and allowed me to hint at a story between them. The decision to have my characters are defined by a small selection of items ie the chefs being made of food worked in my favour as well.
Q: Weaknesses I found during this project
I again left promotion context images to the last week and had to cut them out. I think producing these could take my project to the next level, so I should really try to reach for those.
I struggled with the Captain and Carpenter characters in this project. The carpenter because his anatomy is so different to the characters I normally produce. I should have set aside time to study his body type for before drawing him. The Captain’s design took awhile because I was set on having him made out of fake gems and monopoly type money, which hindered the design for awhile.
Q. What stressed me out the most during this project?
The vehicle aspect of this project was a worry from day one. As i've never drawn vehicles I saw it taking a lot of time to complete, time that I could better be spending on my character design. luckily I managed to complete the vehicle in a way that made it another potential character as opposed to a static object.
Conclusion:
I really enjoyed this project and I’m proud of the way my characters turned out. I could work more on the character rending as I could only do basic shadows for my intermediate outcomes. the flat style works for these but i'd like to get some light and form in there
Action plan:
The continuation of this project would be all about putting my characters in the context of a game. and developing their character sheets to fit that, with expressions and move set images. my Carpenter and Duck characters need another design pass. I’d also like to design some branding for this game to tie everything together.
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