Week 6.1 Rendering out and finishing up

The final week of this project began with finishing off all of my character renders. The rendering process went smoothly for the majority of my characters, with small changes going on throughout. the captain and the carpenter character had the largest amount of changes to them:

I completely revamped the captains look and colour palette to fit in with the rest of the crew. I discarded my initial idea of having his clothes made out of fake monopoly money as this didn't seem to work out pallet wise. his just ended up too desaturated/neutral to fit in with the rest of the crew. so i gave him a more traditional pirate look, with a hint to his money loving ways represented by the coin on his belt. and the his ridiculousness of his weapon stayed.

The carpenter character poses did not work in the lineup so i went out changing it, though it's better, i feel like design in general no longer works with the crew, so i'd like to redesign him at a later point. With the lineup set I went about presenting my characters. my previous project lacked consistent presentation so I produced a standard sheet for all of my characters.

I unfortunately did not have time to make promo images for my pirate crew, though i'd like to go back to that later on. though I did do some character exploration with my sailmaster Mache with the hope or completing a character sheet for promotional purposes. though it didn't happen, i have something to build on in the future.



I love how the final lineup looks, though I did not go into enough detail with the lighting like I would have like to as I needed to move onto the vehicle design of this project.



I was stuck for what to do with this vehicle I ended up roughly thumbnailing out and idea of having a duck carrying the pirate crew, with them riding on rubber ducks behind it. this idea good initially but it would have taken too long to concept out the rubber ducks like I wanted. with each character having their own personalised duck. I played around with the idea of toy wooden boats, boats in general, and a miss-matched of a monster truck vehicle idea was thrown around too.

In the end I kept the duck idea and ended up roughly photobashing a pack mule type character.

Week 5- Refinement

To begin the week I finished off the initial thumbnails of my Nano pirates. With my 12 characters chosen I moved onto refining their designs, and laying down the flat colours for each of them, ready for rendering. The majority of my characters went through this process with ease though I have had a few design issues with my Captain, Quartermaster and the Chef family.

Captain:
I found that amongst my other designs the captain got lost, he is so far the weakest design as he doesn't quite fit with the rest of the crew.Firstly because his colors are desaturated compared to the others and though I wanted him to be short to emphasise his uselessness in comparison to the rest of the crew this became too much. Here it was suggested to me to give him a large hat, or stilts, so I could keep his original height, but bring him up to the level of the crew artificially.



Quartermaster:
The quartermaster needed some tweaking, the caterpillar around her neck was not reading well and I could not figure out a way of giving it a face (so I can show that it is alive) without it looking too cartoon like, or creepy. The green colour also blended too much with her overall outfit. So I changed it too a worm, as it's a change in colour and it works without a face.

Chef Family:
My fruit and vegetable Pirates have changed quite a bit from their thumbnails, First of all I wanted to figure out their face shapes as this wasn't clear when I was thumbnailing them. Though I originally chose the highlighted set of faces I felt like they didn't work so I'm still working on them. The Candy Sister needed general refining, so again I played around with her face shape and clothing. I wanted to keep her unkempt look, cupcake case skirt and toothy smile regardless of the changes and I believe I came out with a stronger design. At the end of the week I began rendering out my characters.













Unfortunately I did not reach my goal of being completely finished with my character sheets, so I may have to polish the designs I already have to a promotional standard. Rather than make new illustrations like I originally planned.

So my goals for the end of next week are to finish my character lineup, and create their ship.with the stretch goals of:

Thumbnailing promotional illustrations of my pirates in context.

- Complete a full character sheet (expressions, detail shots, extra poses) for one of my Pirates.

Week 4- Nano Pirates!

This week is the start of my second project Nano Pirates. I picked this project as its one I can have the most fun with. This project is very much about trying out and developing my own style for character design.

As always I started the project by going through the brief and setting up the goals for myself. My main goal is to render all of my characters to a polished state so I can have a final character line-up. I'd also like one or two promo images to put them into context. Since I did not get to bring my characters to a polished state in my last project due to time constraints I'm going to try and condense my design process down for this project to be able to meet that goal. So by the end of this project I'd have 12 consistent images in a style that I enjoy working in. It's also a test for me to figure out if i want to work on this style further for my FMP.

To begin this project I had a clear idea of the type of style I wanted to aim towards. Inspired mainly by the artist Alexandre Diboine and Double fine's Broken Age, I want a simplified and textured look to my characters, with exaggerated silhouettes for all of them. I selected a few key images to work as my main style guide. With my last project I became lost in the all my moodboard images, so I wanted to refine this fairly on.

I also made a time plan so I could figure out what needed to be changed in my design process to acheive my goals. In the end I decided to cut my iteration process down with the aim of having all my designs ready to render by the end of the first week.

Before I began concepting my characters I made some quick notes about any potential household objects my characters could wear/ wield. I decided to have all my characters fit a certain theme. For example having a chef character comprised of items you can only find in a kitchen, to make it clear who this character is and what job they have in the crew.

Quick household objects moodboard

It was also suggested to me to look up the official jobs on a pirate ship (http://www.thepirateking.com/historical/ship_roles.htm) which helped with figuring out the roles of my 12 characters. With this I listed all the jobs, with a description of the type of character I'd like to fill that role. This gave me a image in my mind to work off of for my characters.

With rough descriptions in place I began thumbnailing in my sketchbook. I then took aspects of my favourite thumbnails and cleaned them up. Because I want to render out as many of my characters as possible I skipped straight to colour when refining these characters. At the end of the week I've almost finished my initial line-up of characters, I'm two characters behind at this moment But I'm really enjoying how these look so far.

By the end of next week I'd like to be finished with the character sheets, ready for some promotional images for the week following

Week 3-Viking Hand in

Name: Sarah Wright
P Number: p1322992x
Email: p1322992x@email.dmu.ac.uk
Project Title: VS- Partially Stylized Character Project

Overview: To produce semi-stylized Viking characters based on the artwork of JC Leyendecker. The lead character is going to be a spritely young girl, with a collection of supporting characters from her village, and enemy characters. For this project I produced a main character 3 support character one main Enemy character and 2 lower enemy characters as well as promotional images.

The process for this included:

• Researching and studying Leyendeckers’ work specifically his style of rendering. 
• Finding "modern day Vikings" to bas my characters faces and body types on 
• Researching Viking Clothing 
• Sketching out my collection of characters 
• Preparing my characters for colour and exploring pallets 
• Producing final renders. 

Research/Mood boards:







Thumbnails:
A few sketches to get a feel for the characters I wanted to produce, in response to my Viking mood board.

Further Character Iterations:

Design Evaluation:

Colour research/thumbnails

I began this process by creating clown renders of my characters, from there I base my first pallets off the colouring in my Viking clothing mood board. After some feedback it was suggested that I take inspiration from Leyendecker for my colour choices. So I made a reference sheet of hero and villain images that I could extract my pallets from, this worked very well and I'm pleased with how the final pallets turned out.

Rendering Studies:
​Noting down the materials present in my character designs and studying how Leyendecker renders these.

Final Character Sheets:

Render Crib Sheet:

This was created in response to feedback, it was suggested to me that I put all the reference I needed for my more polished outcomes onto one sheet, so I did not lose sight of the Leyendecker look I needed to stick to.

Hel Character Exploration:

Composition thumbnails and Polished Promotional Images:

Evaluation Q&A

Q: Did I answer the brief?
Not particularly, in trying to hit the quantity of characters needed for the brief I missed out when it came to rendering them all in a Leyendecker style. I plan to put my characters back in the context of Leyendecker’s work when I revisit this project.

Q: How well did I mange my time
Pretty well. I ran out of time to polish some of my characters, but I can make that up at a later point. I feel like my hero designs are fairly strong though. However because I'm not used to the level of characters I had to produce I had to skip some iteration when it came to designing my enemy characters, and overall rendering time was cut. For future project I'll need to cut down the steps I usually take when producing designs.

Q: Did my end result represent what I wanted for this project?

Yes, I produced the quantity of characters I needed for this project, and I am happy with the designs of the majority of them. When it comes to the level of polish I wanted I didn't quite hit that, but that’s a matter of time rather than ability. 

Q: Strengths I found during this project

I was more efficient and organised in my process than I normally am. I'm used to creating one character at a time so I gave myself several opportunities to evaluate and check my characters against each other to make sure they all fit as a group, which helped me produce some solid designs.

Q: Weaknesses I found during this project
Trying to render my characters in the style of Leyendecker was an issue throughout this project.

Q. What stressed me out the most during this project?
The quantity of characters threw me when it came to cleaning them all up to an intermediate level.

Conclusion:
Overall I love how the main character and Hel turned out. Though I fell a little short on time to develop my enemies my hero characters worked out great this project.This project may not have turned out as polished as i'd like, i can see where I can develop this and improve upon it. Also how I can mold this to better fit into my portfolio. So that’s a win for me.