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.