Character Modeling 2: Seignik Bahamut Skin

Here's a little bit of WIP of my character for Second Project:

Putting some joints in the wings, for shits and giggles.

Model fully rigged and posed.

Opened wings.

Now all that's left is texturing. I don't think I'll have time to make his Megaflare gun, but maybe that can be done after Second Project's due.

Part 2 of this character can be found here.

EA Art Test

I completed this art test about a month ago, and after making sure I could post it here it is. :D

This was a character concept test. Three different types of human silhouettes were given, and I chose the tank of a man and the woman. Genre/theme, wise, I went for fantasy and sci-fi. The characters also had to be drawn in varying styles, and one of them had to have a turnaround sheet.

The bulky man silhouette was the toughest concept for me; for some reason, I was hating all the concepts I was coming up with for him. Among his silhouettes above, the rock, dragon, and last four of the tank man were my top choices. The rock felt too typical of a choice and the dragon's flowy hair and cloth may not be a feasible choice for a game character, so the last four silhouettes of this knight looking thing were my best bet.
The idea behind the knight came from my sudden, ridiculous urge to put fireflies in a suit of armor. The big, bulbous right shoulder reminded me of a lamp, so I thought it would be cute to put fireflies in there.  I also looked up a bunch of reference of old lamp posts and ornate lanterns, to fit with the whole "lamp" theme. Here's the final concept, dubbed "Knight Light":

The fireflies kinda turned into magical, purple fire. It could still be magical purple fireflies. :'D

The last character concept, the woman, was the easiest one for me to do (as there aren't as many silhouette explorations for her compared to the man). Since I wanted this one to be sci-fi, I felt more at ease coming up with a silhouette/gesture that I liked. This is what she turned out to be:

This art test was a straight 24 hour marathon that left me, health-wise, beaten and destroyed. It was the most glorious achievement of my life... :'D

Character Modeling: Seignik (Part 2)

Part 1 of this character's process can be found here.

Now that thesis was finally over, I was able to complete this character. Last time, I ended Seignik's progress with a turnaround of his model with baked in ambient occlusion. The next step was figuring out what kind of color scheme to give him, because I thought the initial sketch looked a little too much like Megaman.

Here are the different color schemes I came up with. I tried playing around with contrast and mixing up the placements of the lights and darks. This was the final scheme I ended up using:

(Rendered in UDK)

Because of Seignik's exaggerated proportions and stylish look, I thought that a toon shader would look good on him. At first I was just going leave Seignik's textures plain and let the shader do all the work, but after some critique I was told to add textural detail. 

Now that I was adding all this grunge onto the armor, the metal areas needed some spec to really feel like metal. I was having a hard time trying to adjust the spec: either the edges of the spec were too soft or the spec covered too much of the armor's surface. I wanted to get a tight, hard-edged shine on the metal that wouldn't interfere with the rest of the toon shader.

Upon discovering that all I needed to do was change one constant node, this was the result I was most satisfied with.

And finally, here is the final model and its contact sheet:

In conclusion:

I really enjoyed modeling this character, though I know I still need to improve poly optimization and conserving texture space. The original model was over 12,000 polys and the textures maps were all 2048x2048 (except the emissive map, which remained 512x512). Messing with the toon shader was also a bit of a hassle, but it was definitely a learning experience. I do want to get better at making Materials in UDK. 

For anyone who cares, Streamline was an idea of mine that was inspired from a mixture of the anime show IGPX, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Wipeout. Characters raced each other on rails using technology called "Stream Boots": boots that had various classes of high speed rockets attached to them. The racers, or "Runners" as they're called, also wore armored suits not only for protection, but also for powering their Stream Boots and any other equipment they wanted to attach to their armor. By default, the armor suits provided an energy shield for extra defense, but additional equipment included shield upgrades, beam weapons (knives, guns, etc.), and others. Runners had to manage energy consumption wisely, however, because extra equipment drained their suits' energy, thus slowing their speed during a race. 

Seignik here has a Class C, Medium Weight type armor suit with a Class C speed rank. If anyone remembers his Bahamut skin, that would be a Class A, Medium Weight type suit with a Class A speed rank. The Bahamut skin also includes a Megaflare Railgun.

Process Log 10: The Temple Guardian

Here's the process I went through in creating the Temple Guardian, informally known as Sherlock after watching several episodes of the BBC show dubbed the same name. :'D This was a character I worked on for senior thesis with Erica Berman. More process of our project can be found here: http://metalmelon.blogspot.com/

The initial idea I had for Sherlock was a monster plant that had a decoy to lure it's prey. It essentially had two bodies, one immobile that was rooted to the ground that acted as the lure, and the main body that sprouted out of the lower body.

Explored various types of heads for the main body. Two of my main references were deepsea fish and kabuto beetles.

This was the final turnaround and silhouette test for Sherlock.

Some modeling WIP:

Then I came across a pretty big problem. As I was modeling the lower body, I realized that the decoy's design looked too intimidating, thus driving anything that would've been lured away. After receiving crits from colleagues and faculty, it was set in stone that I had to go back and fix the head of Sherlock's lower body.

Referring back to the pencil sketches above, I did some more exploration of some cuter decoy heads. I ended up going with a simple flower head with no lure.

Coming up with a cohesive color scheme was also another challenge I ran into when I made the adjustments to the lower body. The third iteration in the image above was the concept I ended up using. Here's the cool reference that inspired the color scheme:

(Huernia piersii)

And here is the final model with all its textures:

Update: Sherlock in context

Process Log 9: Progressions 2 (Ryan)

For this Process Log, I wanted to share 3 years worth of ideation and exploration of a single character I've been fleshing out for quite some time: Ryan Zaneth, the main character of my story called "MOTH" (work in progress title).

Ryan's Base Appearance
Progressions read from left to right:

Ryan's character was born from my sudden interest in parkour. After delving myself in the sport for a year and watching both Banlieue 13 (District B13) movies, I came up with the dynamic posed sketch in the top left. Key attributes of his appearance were spiky black hair, facial hair, a large, tribal tattoo on his left shoulder, and scars on the right side of his body from an accident he had several years ago. His backstory was that he worked as a courier in a place called the "Underground Network" and he had a girlfriend who was forced to leave him because her father hated him for social and political reasons. He was also called "Raien" at the time.

Then I went through a phase of just drawing his head, experimenting with various styles. I changed his name to "Ryan" because when I did some name research, "Raien" is apparently a girl's name in other languages. :'D Ryan's backstory went through some dramatic changes, too: I scrapped his original backstory and came up with one that involved amnesia (hence some of the head sketches have a patch on the forehead) and an ability to conjure holographic armor onto his body. His design also lost the tattoo and accident scars.

In the cloud of all the head sketches with different expressions to the rest of the image above, that was when I had finally settled on an art style. As for his final design, he lost the patch on his forehead and instead gained a glowing blue infection on the left side of neck that trails up to his lower jaw and a surgical scar that travels down his torso. His backstory also developed into the story that it is now (I will not spoil it here). Even though he went through many changes, going from being a simple courier to a stealth super soldier, he still maintained his abilities as a traceur.

Ryan's Armor Design
When I scrapped Ryan's first backstory, I gave him this armor conjuring ability that turned him into a stealth super soldier. The design for Ryan's armor changed over the course of 3 years as well:

The very first design I came up with for a stealth super soldier was for a game design assignment. Key attributes of the design were seven "eyes" and blade-like protrusions on the helmet, built-in weapons on the forearms, and sharp, thermal claws. The armor was also form-fitting as it was supposed to allow mobility.

The second iteration of the design involved adding visual noise. I felt the functionality of the first iteration didn't make much sense, so I tried reworking the placement of the armor bits. I also played around with the idea of its "eyes" by adding more all over the body. This eventually became the armor's signature look. I brought this second iteration into Photoshop and began painting in the details, but something about its silhouette bothered me: the helmet's design looked too Power Rangers.

Going back to the drawing board, I tried to come up with a sleeker helmet design. As I was exploring different blade-like shapes to attach to the head, I looked back at the second design and found that I didn't like it. The segmented armor didn't look like it would function properly. Now I had no satisfying design. Coincidentally, I was playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution at the time, and I loved the sleek look of the augmented characters. Taking this inspiration, I redrew Ryan's stealth armor, brought it into Photoshop, and ended up with final result that it is now.

Ryan's armor became my mascot and branding because it encompassed everything I like in sci-fi armor: stealth, sleekness, mobility, and "eyes". Unlike Ryan's human appearance that went through key attribute changes, his armor maintained its key attributes from the first iteration to the last.

Conclusion
For Ryan's base appearance, my main focus was to have storytelling elements included in his design - I wanted hints of his backstory shown on him. For his armor design, functionality was the number one hurdle I had issues with. I had fun coming up with the different design iterations, but each one was a step towards a better understanding of armor function and maneuverability. I tried to envision myself wearing this armor: would it be comfortable? Is it flexible? Does it look unique while at the same time remain practical? Developing this character has been a thoughtful and exciting journey and overall, I'm pretty satisfied with both of Ryan's appearances.