Saturday 22 November 2014

Week 8: From Objects to Lifeform

Character Project

We started a new project again this week, this time we have to design a dichotomous character duo and then take one of those characters and create a 3D model of it. We have been given 3 weeks to do so and are told to stick to a given timeline and in return have been given complete freedom as to what we can do. The only rule to this project is that it has to be 2 characters that are dichotomous, but live in the same universe.

This is different to any other projects we had done before and for the first time ever we are stepping away from our usual realistic style at DMU and are being given freedom to explore other artistic styles, which is certainly interesting. Of course, since there aren't any guidelines for us to stick to, we could just do a realistic character duo, but since this opportunity has been given to us to do something different I will most likely focus on doing something more stylised for once.

The first week has gone by and it didn't go to well for me. I struggle a lot with characters and when the project started I was completely stumped for ideas. I just didn't know what I was going to do. Eventually I came up with the idea of taking the traditional fox and goose idea and turning them into humanoid characters.

I had done some research and got together a moodboard for each character and started concepting, but I just couldn't get my head around it. In the end I was getting short on time and I ended up with rather displeasing results in time for my presentation on Friday.

Failed Designs and New Beginnings

Not much to my surprise, during my presentation my designs didn't seem to win any awards from the tutors and I ended up being told to go right back to the beginning and start all over. The main reason for this was, that my idea was just too cliché and I didn't really explore all the other awesome ideas that I could have had. While I do agree with this and I am glad, that it turned out this way, I am also a bit sad as I am once again left stumped right at the start. However I shall not let this project defeat me and so I sat down and once again started idea generation by doing simple silhouettes.

So far I haven't got much to show, but here is the beginning of my silhouettes for this project:
As I haven't had much previous experience with idea generation and it's one of the biggest struggles of mine I stuck to using simple shapes and bashing them together to get some silhouettes down, so that I just would get something to work from. This method is a quick way of getting down a lot of interesting shapes, which can then be further developed into characters, considering you have a strong enough imagination to do so.

However, as it is for now I am lacking the ability to see any useful shapes within my silhouettes so I will need to further develop what I have got and maybe try using more complex shapes as a bashkit. I am only slowly making progress, but I am trying hard to get an idea.

I will hopefully be able to get something up by next week, but for now this post is just a short update on how things are. Stay tuned~

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