some drawings to get an idea of what I'm doing

I want to get started sculpting fairly soon, the first thing I did after finding my reference was to do a painting study based on one of the helmets, the purpose of doing so was simply to get myself working with the armour and familiarise myself with it and some of the intricacies. And I got a bit of practice too.

After the study, I did a drawing based on some the qualities I like about the helmet, but changing certain things for originality (as I didn't necessarily want the character to actually be an Ottoman) and making it fit with the character and my original inspiration.

I wanted to obscure the face still but I decided to get rid of the idea of the character limiting the senses to only those necessary as it may be better just to stick to one idea without complicating it, I wanted to stick with the one arrow thing because that works better as a concept.

After the initial sketch I created some very small spin off sketches based on what I was thinking from the main one and using some of my reference images to work some ideas into the design.

Change of design for archer character

A problem I realised a bit too late was that I was basing my character design too much on just the silhouette without giving any real context to the design at all, I didn't really have an inspiration for the setting or the clothing/armour design, the result was that I ended up with kind of a vague design with no idea of specific details/props or material, so in my mind everything was the same vague ma,terial and it didn';t transition well into the practical stage of sculpting, I couldn't picture the drapery of the material because it didn't have any strict property. I started thinking of material properties and I wanted some kind of silk clothing with armour in places like the feet hands and torso. My mind kind of went toward North African aesthetic based on that and then I just gave myself some time to think about it before acting further.

As I was thinking of the direction I wanted to go with the character at some point I started thinking of the character in the game Assassins Creed: Revelations Shahkulu.

As soon as I had the thought I knew instantly that that is what I wanted to base the design off of. Since Shahkulu's armour was based on Ottoman/Byzantine armour designs I looked into that and started gathering reference.

considering changing my character

I have realised that the character I designed, despite looking good in silhouette form is just pretty boring for a a 3D sculpture, I am considering changing the design to something that might be a bit more fun to work on. One of the reasons being that the entire design consists of mainly one material, I would much rather try some kind of monster with multiple textures on it.

I also kind of don't like the lack of facial features, one of the most interesting parts of the design in my opinion is the face, and by removing the face I have also gotten rid of a lot of character.

I want to work with the same concept that I had, of the temperance and the one arrow law holder character but just something a bit more complex. I may to more silhouettes or I may have a go at trying some ideas straight in zBrush.

redone zspheres for archer

I wasn't happy with the topology that I got from the last zsphere base for the character so I started again from scratch, focusing on fixing some of the main problems I had.

One of the biggest problems was the hands, I thought I might have been able to just pull out some polys from a stub but that didn't work well at all, instead this time I created a basic hand with fingers and joints that I can just sculpt onto without worrying too much about the form, of course though as the palm of the hand is a sphere i'll have to fix that in the sculpting stage.

Another problem I had with the last mesh was that I had extruded the legs straight out of the torso without creating any 'hips' which meant that the legs were too close together and the mesh merged the base of the legs together kid of making the torso longer in effect. This time I added two zspheres to separate the legs and pulled more out of that, which gave the legs breathing room so that the mesh wouldn't merge.

Some other minor things I did was to change the way I created the 'hood', before I bought out a zsphere in front of the face with the intention of just sculpting onto that, but this time I just hinted toward the shape of the hood with 2 spheres and I'll just sculpt that as necessary. One of the other main problems with the last zsphere sculpture that I made was that I built it to resemble how the clothes would look before actually deciding for sure how they would hang from the body or the material so that only made things harder, this time I just got the basic anatomy of the body and I will probably build the clothing on top of that. I also changed the feel to give them more of a taper.

I'm not too happy with the posture, I may change that or I might just try and fix it later on.

zsphere practice and blocking out archer in 3D

These are fairly old I just never got around to uploading them until now. They are two creatures I made using zSpheres as practice, I didn't want to do the form finding phase in 3D as I was enjoying silhouettes, but I tried a couple anyway for practice.

Dinosaur

Goat creature

I liked how easy it was to create a basic form using zSpheres so I decided to use them to take my archer design into 3D.

I'm not entirely happy with how it looks so far, while zSpheres are great for mapping out organic forms it proved a bit awkward designing them an clothed figure using them, before I was using the spheres for joints but that doesn't quite work with zSpheres. then when I started sculpting the base mesh at a very low poly resolution I find that it's looking very lumpy. I will keep working into this a bit more though and see how it turns out.

head silhouette variations

I decided to do some more close up silhouettes of the head to use to get an idea of the general aesthetic of the archer.

I wanted to try and not get caught up on necessarily making the archer look 'good' just because the subject was a holy virtue. The first design that stands out from the rest as looking very different, I was just playing around with the idea of having a different face, rather than the hood, I thought maybe it would have some kind of skull face with one of the eyes caved in or obscured. I didn't linger around that for long because I didn't like how it looked and thought the subtlety of the design was lost. After deciding that I didn't like that direction I took it back to where I was before and started to just play around with the hood a bit, the shape and the way it hangs. From 2-4 it kind of just looks like I was just flipping the same hood into different positions but I kind of had individual reasons for each. The first one (2) looks kind of like the hood of a executioner archetype, the second is a little more demonic looking and I thought at that stage that it was starting to look a little to evil so I took it back. In the third stage (4) I thought it might look more sleek and archer-like with the hood pressed forward, it also kind of reminds me of a robin hood hat, which works.
The last two I don't quite like, 5 looks far too 'witch' like and looks kind of evil so I didn't want to go with that, and while I kind of like 6 it looks kind of creepy with the large eye visible through the hole.

4 is definitely my favourite I think, and while it doesn't really look a lot different from what I already had it helped me to solidify and idea and a style and I can play with that now.

I sort of want to take the idea into zbrush now because I don't know if there is a lot left that I really can do in 2D without going into too much detail. Due to the nature of the design I am going to have to do lots of drapery practice in zbrush, although I may take the design into there and only work into it to the extent where I don't need to drapery to look 100% convincing just to draft out the general shape and then I can refine later.

Elaborating on past designs

I decided to just drop the insect creature altogether as I was more enthusiastic about my other two designs and there was a great chance that it wouldn't have even qualified for the brief of the project anyway.

I had planned on doing lots of iterative variations on my chosen two designs but I chose instead to just create one more elaborate version of each silhouette that could pass for an actual design and then just take it from there into either a more detailed drawing, or to start blocking it out in zbrush straight away and iterating on the idea from there, once I choose an idea I will then start looking into more detail and finding reference and inspiration to take it further.

All I really did with this silhouette was add a bit more detail and play with the detail I already had to make it a bit more interesting such as the vine tentacles. I do quite like this design, I think it looks nice and I like how it almost looks like a king with a crown but I'm not really feeling inspired by it, I'm not thinking about the world it belongs to or the life that it lives, as far as I'm concerned it's just a sort of rocky vine golem thing, and I think to take it to the next level and create something actually interesting I need to create something that I can get invested in, where I can imagine the world it lives in and how it lives. I felt like my archer character had more potential for that.

Not only does the archer have more potential for characterisation but I also was made aware of one of the new tasks in creating this character, the character has to personify or embody one of the 7 Heavenly Virtues, The one that stood out to me as having the most potential for an interesting character was temperance. I decided that the idea of temperance could be quite nicely attributed to the archer silhouette. The archer could be a righteous law-holder in a world, and in order to practice constraint in the carrying out of his justice he would carry with him at all times only a single arrow, meaning he could only carry out justice once, lest he waste an arrow and encounter a greater injustice later unable to act. I also was able to transfer the new meaning into the costume design, the single slit in the hood would allow vision to only one eye, restraining the senses to only those necessary. Of course an archer would probably need depth perception too but I think as imagery it works.

Last set of silhouettes

I created one last set of silhouettes which will most likely be my last. The same deal as before, I chose a new colour to work with and see how that may influence my hand, but this time I substituted the black with a darker variation of the colour just really for aesthetic purposes.

I started out creating sort of zombie like guys with big mutated club hands and went from there, I kind of like what I came up with but I felt in the end that they were turning out kind of similar to the silhouettes from the last group with the big rocky top-heavy bodies so I went in a completely new direction and came up with a sort of lanky hooded figure that I quite liked (5) so I simply took that a bit further with 7 and I just decided that I wanted to settle with that design so detailed into it a little more than I intended. I think it is ready to take into the next stage and I have enough silhouettes that I like that I can move on from this initial stage and try detailing and iterating on some of the others. 

Pictured are my favourite three silhouettes from what I did already, 1 is obviously tricky because I don't even know if I'll be able to carry it forward any further but I'm pretty happy with the potential for 2 and 3 that I should have some good stuff to choose from even if I don't end up using it at all.

More silhouettes

I have to say I didn't enjoy my previous experience with silhouettes last year, in the first project where we were creating silhouettes based on a very specific character (in my case a napoleonic era 'soldier'). The silhouette process did prove useful as the character I ended up creating was so far from what I would have ever designed if I had the freedom to instantly start drawing as soon as I thought of something, I felt that the limitations made it very restrictive and I had a hard time differentiating one silhouette from another. However in this project having freedom to design essentially whatever I want and with no limitation to how many silhouettes I have to produce I am enjoying the process a lot more and I feel like I am really feeling the benefit of quickly drafting out designs without going into detail rather than feeling like it is just holding me back from refining a design that I like.

After the disappointing yield of silhouettes last time around, before I discovered the new brush, I decided this time to go into the process with more of an idea of what I was going to do in mind before starting. I wanted to see how I could use the brush to influence me creatively so I chose a colour different from the red I used before (which was really just an arbitrary choice) and use that to influence what I draw, I took a sort or seaweed green and with that in mind started creating something like sea creature monsters.

Playing around with the seamonster idea I starting drawing the arms as tentacles, but very soon I started thinking of them almost like big roots or something, so I started creating more plant like monsters and golems. By that time I had become a lot more loose with the silhouettes and I think '7' was probably the most dramatic and interesting based on detail, gesture and energy but over all I think my favourite personally is number 4 or 5, while they are not particularly interesting at this stage I feel that they have the most potential to be taken further and iterated onto. While 7 is easily the most interesting to look at of the bunch it is kind of a generic flower monster I think and doesn't really have a whole lot of potential for development. I do quite like the idea of the tiny flower face of silhouettes 6 and 8 though, they have a sort of creepy feeling to them which I like, I certainly would be going for a 'horror' aesthetic with these silhouettes if I am to take any of them further.

Bipedal Creature

The aim of this project was revealed as being to design and create a bipedal creature in zBrush.  The first design stage was to come up with some silhouettes in order to block out some rough designs and get an idea of what we want to do. In order that I would not get distracted by a preconceived idea of what I wanted to design I decided to go into the silhouetting stage with a completely empty mind, I banned myself from even giving any consideration to what I could do. This resulted in a couple of really uninspired and boring silhouettes that weren't inspiring me at all, I only did a few (1-5) then took a break.

When I returned I just had a play around with brushes to start with and completely by chance I stumbled onto a brush that I had always had but never really knew what it did. The brush takes the two colours on your colour palette (primary and secondary) and uses the pressure sensitivity to create a gradient between those two colours, in my case hard brushstrokes would be black and light would be red.

This proved to be a pretty nice tool when creating silhouettes, it made it possible to kind of hint toward detail without having to really actually go over the silhouette with a new brush or eraser allowing more detail but maintaining the speed and roughness of silhouettes.

Moving onto silhouettes 6-10, there is an obvious problem, I kind of got carried away with the new brush and almost forgot about the fact that the creature had to be bipedal. I kind of liked where the design was going. The initial silhouette which was created using very vague generic strokes sort of made me think of an insect creature, and I iterated on that sort of refining the design. After silhouette 8 was when I realised that the creature was no longer bipedal so I took the design and tried my best at literally giving the creature two legs to stand on, the problem there came from the fact that you can't really give an insect creature beefy human legs because it just looks silly, and it's near impossible to give a bipedal creature stick thin insect legs, it simply could never support the weight or balance for the lack of muscle. In silhouette 10 I tried to take the four legged variation and push the form a bit to kind of give it the stature of a bipedal creature but just with four legs for support this time, I figured perhaps I could make it a bipedal in spirit despite actually having four legs. I wasn't satisfied with the extent to the bipedal-isation of the 10th silhouette so I took it further in a more detailed iteration of the same design.

In this version I gave the creature a much more humanoid thorax and very human-like arms only with spider like extremities(hands), I also pushed the abdomen up to remove some of the horizontal length of the creature. I'm actually pretty happy with this design now and I am going to take it into a further iterative stage and see if I can take this design further despite being only bipedal in spirit, although it has occurred to me that the two leg limit may not have been as arbitrary as I was thinking, it's possible that the two leg limit may be to do with animation and rigging potential, in other words to be a game ready asset. But I will take this further still and I will have to just check up on it on Monday and have my fingers crossed, in the mean time I should probably consider some true bipedal alternatives to be safe.

zBrush practice

This week in preparation for the current 3D sculpting project, I just wanted to focus on familiarising myself with zbrush's interface as it's a programme that I have never used before.

I started out just watching a few progress videos of other people's sculpts and felt inspired to try a bust for myself, I downloded a simple base mesh and then try sculpting a kind of orc character just to warm up and see how I felt about the programme.

http://luckilytip.blogspot.com.au/search/label/basemesh?&max-results=3#.Us8iZ56bGSp

Basemesh

My sculpture

Creating this sculpture made me aware of many specific areas that need improvement so I know where to improve, One of the issues was that I didn't know how to add more objects into the sculpture, for example using some sphere primitives for eyes and teeth that I had planned on adding so now I have been looking into how to do that and generally doing a lot more research and watching videos on youtube before doing anything else ambitious so that I have the tools to take the next project to completion, or at least have the freedom to do what I want.

Although sculpting over a base mesh has it's benefits such as not having to worry about the initial foundation sculpting process I would like to try creating come sculptures completely from scratch starting with a sphere as it may lead to more freedom (the orc sculpture kind of looks like a resculpted human face)