Dichotomy Project

3 Week Project

Design two characters, Model and texture one.

First Task, select a theme that the rest of the project can spark from. I chose Rich and Poor. Luckily I already had an Idea in mind to run with, a story I've been tinkering with for many years now.

The story revolves around a civilization that lives in the ancient ruins of a vast endless metropolis. The current inhabitants are a tiny spec of life a small town maybe. 

The Rich live at the top of the towers, and the poor live towards the base. These people have reached minimal levels of development; they still have mechanical remnants of the past, e.g. basic guns, Metal work, but have no electronics.

The poor live in a hostile environment; they may be hunter gatherers, poachers etc. The Rich are their over lords, they own them, it’s basically a middle age (game of thrones) style hierarchy. The difference is the vertical landscape. 

I wrote down some contrasting words to describe the characters, and fill them out. I’m going to be designing these characters whilst taking Dichotomy into account.

After watching the presentations about this project I now know the importance of this in design. If the characters are meant to be different from a none visual point of view as in their beliefs, their personalities, and whether they are good or bad, this should be represented in their appearance.  Curvy forms tend to lend towards nice characters and angles to evil for example. 

Also even if two characters that aren't meant to have apposing traits, you still don’t want them to blend into one character and be indistinguishable, so using apposing forms, colors, tones and general designs between them will separate them. 

I fined the word Dichotomy to be a bit inappropriate, Dichotomy simply insinuates extremes of difference when designing. So if one character is skinny, the other by default must be fat, if one is short the other is tall, with no fought involved. Following dichotomy would result in everyone having the same characters. Although the word has become a cliché for an art student to use, Juxtaposition would be more appropriate. This would imply only adding features that enhances both characters as a hole instead of mindlessly mirroring and reversing attributes.

I have given myself a world concept to design to, a theme and some rules. This is similar to industry at the early concepting faze where the brief will never be open. I will never be asked to design a character without any kind of back story, as the back story is not my job. (Obviously here I have written the back story but I have not wasted time coming up with it I have simply picked it, and now I am running with the basic brief I have given myself).

Initial Mood Boards

Poor

Rich

These are my initial mood boards, most of the images are from real life, this is because I intend on creating a realistic character model. So real life ref is best. 

Due to Sentry Gun Hand in and the start of this Project (Last Thursday, so I'm currently 5 day behind) over lapping it is very late Monday evening (Tuesday Morning), and we must have both finale character design set in concrete by Thursday, including Orthographics.  So completely fleshed out and finished, surface detail etc. This will mean an extremely condensed design process. 

Tutor comments to take into account

These projects need to be done with finale piece in mined you want to create a real strong 3D Model at the end of this project that shows good technical skill, a portfolio piece.

One of the problems with this co-hort is that we spend too much time at the concepting faze, when this course really isn't about that, its about creating impressive 3D work. We need to quickly fined a design which is cool, that we can use to demonstrate 3D skill, then quickly drop the design faze and just Model and texture it.  

This project is an opportunity to teach us Z-Brush.

My basic world concept and character Ideas are good, I should continue down this path.

Mood Board Development

The problem with these mood boards is that I hadn’t decided yet whether I was designing the rich character visiting the lower city, So I included weapons and helmets in his board as well as the poor.  Also the poor are meant to wear skins and pelts, it’s meant to be cold at the top of the city so I also included furs for the rich. Also I had the idea that both characters must obviously live in the same world this meant I was trying to give them similar design cues.

After looking at these I decided that I needed to design them for their own environment.  So the rich would lose any kind of weapon or protective gear.  Also the rich now also don’t wear furs; they only wear newly made clean materials.

There are historic elements to represent their current level of development; we can relate these styles to our own history. But there are also future styles to get across that this is actually in the very, very distant future.

Poor 

Rich

I’m really excited about this project at this point. After seeing my sentry gun design come to life I’m really looking forward to seeing one of these characters in the flesh. If this project is as successful as the sentry gun this should be really cool, and having a character model in my portfolio should be a real boost as we have only done one of these before (the other one being the gladiator, being our first sculpt of a character it’s really quite poor, so I feel as characters are so important we really need to nail the 3D Sculpt for this project, and learn as much as we can). 

The First Image is not my work: Title: The Concentration City Name: Maciej Drabik Country: Poland Software: 3ds vray Photoshop Submitted: 20th May 2014