Process Log 8: Seignik Bahamut Skin

Remember that chibi proportioned character I was working on modeling a few posts back? I'm still working on him, but I came up with an alternate skin off to the side for fun. It all started when I went back to a 2 year old drawing I never finished:

I never finished this chibinized Bahamut from Final Fantasy X because there was simply too much going on with his design that I got bored of coloring in the visual noise. When I drew the sketch 2 years back, I thought it would've been fun to paint the details in, but no. It wore me out and I never looked at this drawing again until this year. (Sad to say, this chibi is probably going into The Scrap Pile.)

The Idea:
Then I thought: how can I compensate for the effort I lost in painting this chibi? I'd always wanted to do an Aeon chibi from FFX and Bahamut was my favorite.

I did some brainstorming and Seignik, that one character I was modeling, popped up in my head. I sketched out an idea and blocked it's line art in with black to test it's silhouette. That's when I got the idea for a Bahamut skin for Seignik.

The Process:

The final concept

Solving the Color Challenge:

I had some issues when deciding what the final color was going to be. Seignik's Bahamut skin is based off the design seen in FFX, so my original intention was to stay close to the design and color scheme of the FFX Bahamut. When I applied its flat colors, none of it seemed to work together.

The top left iteration was the original design's color scheme. In my attempts to fix this problem, I did several iterations, experimenting with various color combos and trying to balance contrast at the same time. Then I had another idea...

I recalled that I liked the color scheme of FFXIII's Bahamut: the purple theme was unique and I loved the accent of the red claws. I applied this color scheme to my concept and it worked much better than my original intent. 

Conclusion:

The most challenging factor I had with painting this concept was balancing color and contrast. The wings on this design were particularly distracting, so what I ended up doing was pushing the wings back by muting and blurring it a bit to bring the main body - my main focus - to the foreground. I also missed painting in graphic/cartoon style. 

And once the Seignik model is done, I hope to model this skin next. :'D

Process Log 7: Modular Character

This Process Log is old but I don't think I ever showed the whole thing on this blog. These images were also originally in my 2D Portfolio, but I figured they're better suited for the Process Logs instead. Here's the entire process of developing this character redesign from sketch to 3D:

This assignment was a project in Drawing for Game Art (DGA) class where we chose an existing character and redesigned it while keeping their same mechanics. The character I selected was Elliot Salem from Army of Two. Using a program called Alchemy, I quickly painted some silhouettes, experimenting with various shapes and combining them with Salem's base silhouette.

A silhouette from the Redesign exploration was chosen and further defined. This firefighter look was the design that was chosen.

Further defined the detail and modularity of the character.

Experimented with various burn scars.

Experimented with various color schemes of the final modularity.

The final concept to be modeled later. This turnaround was for the base model.

And this was the turnaround for the second stage of modularity.

And now for some brief process of the modeling:

After completing the low poly model in Maya, I went into Zbrush for some hi poly sculpting:

The head went through some funny changes. I had problems deciding the character's haircut:

Once texturing phase kicked in, this was what I ended up keeping. :'D

I liked how the eye turned out in the Zbrush window.

Completed textures for the base appearance.

Completed textures for secondary appearance.

All three low-poly models showing the levels of modularity.

Brought the model into UDK and started working with the materials.

This was the final pose for the character.

Got some Fresnel on dem stripes.

And finally, the turnaround sheets:

This is the second character model I've ever done, so it's kinda crappy. I documented it well though, so I wanted to at least share that.

Process Log 6: Progressions

This Process Log isn't really a "process log", but I thought it would be cool to share some of the progression I went through from 2009 to now. I like to look back at old characters I drew and revamp them, just to see how much I've learned over the course of my schooling.

A familiar piece...

Soon to be finished piece...

This one involved experimentation of art style.

I hope to post more of these progressions. Yay for nostalgia :'D

Character Modeling: Seignik

I've been working on this character off to the side but because of school I haven't been able to finish it. Now I have some time to get it done.
Here's some images of the process I went through working on this original character called Seignik. It's a bit jumbled.

I drew this concept at GDC 2010. I used a Sharpie marker for the line art and Faber Castell markers for coloring. At the time, I just drew this character for fun with no future modeling intentions in mind.

When school started up again I had a goal to practice as much modeling as I could outside of schoolwork. The character I drew during GDC was one idea that came to mind so I created this very rough turnaround sheet. I wasn't worried about rendering anything here - I just wanted to quickly get a sketch done so I could get straight into modeling.

Here are some WIP shots I recorded last year of the modeling process:

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Then there was about a five month hiatus from this project (due to working on thesis) and now, just today I finished packing the UVs and baked out the ambient occlusion. Next step will be texturing, woo!

More updates to be posted soon.

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Update 4/8/12

Part 2 of this character's process can be found here.