Character Project: Take Two

Extremely condensed design process

I have two weeks to design two characters and then model and texture one character. Normal I try and split projects into three groups Designing, modelling, and texturing. This gives me under 5 days to design two characters. 

Random  Shapes

Here I tried to simply drop random dichotomous groups of shapes with the intension of creating characters. I tried not to delve into the who, what, when where of the characters, but found this extremely difficult. I found that I had to give my characters purpose, a world, story, character. Although the ideas I came up with were extremely simply, they did exists, so I failed at the first hurdle here. These ideas though are not set in concrete; they were constantly changing throughout this process.

I found this generally extremely unsuccessful, but it was fun and interesting to see what I could come up with such limited ref.

Mood Board

I decided at this point that the basic shapes that I had been using were to limiting. The design looks quite insect like so I went onto pinterest and started searching for interesting ref.

The small moth, fly like insect on this board with the elaborate head dresses are called Tree Hoppers and they are amazing.  

I used the quick selection tool in Photoshop to grab random silhouettes from the insects. I then started simply mashing these with the best of my previous silhouettes.  I was really pleased with the way this was going.

Further Development

Here I had kind of settled on an idea, I wonted this giant alien to be obviously evil and dangerous. I also wanted to create a relationship reminiscent of the one below involving both my characters. 

(The Iron Giant)

So a giant powerful, alien evil character, and a venerable, relatable, small, insignificant other character.

This meant creating natural, alien forms that would read as weapons, ranged weapons at that, but without jumping to guns. They would have to be natural in form, but still read as a source of power although there is very little in nature like this.

 Further Development

At which point does a character become so alien that it’s not a character anymore?  Because of this thought I briefly tried to make the main body of the alien more skull like, using the elephant skull as reference. I decided that if the single hole at the front of the alien was an eye with a pupil, then this would be viewed as a living, creature.