Week 7: Chutney troubles

This week was a creative uphill battle with a consistent art block wall forming at the top of every metaphorical ridge. This week was the start of another mini 3 week exercise project with the intention of making us work as quickly and efficiently as possible, and I must admit they really do work no matter how intense they may seem. I decided I would do the realistic character last so I could really make the most of my previous learning outcomes. I was hoping to spend the prior weekend in pre-production getting ready as this is a completely open ended brief with the only certainty being they must have a helmet and must be under 30,000 triangles with a 2048x2048 size material. But I had to go back to London in prep for a trip coming up so I did not have this prep time.

Day 1. I spent this day flailing at the internet trying to think of something that would be beneficial to me technically but creatively interesting enough to make me want to do it. In the end day 1 yielded minimal effect and so I then commenced day 2, after thinking overnight I figured I would pick a game with solid character design and emulate that to help guide me. I would like to point out at this point I did not need to concept the character but still chose to, it’s an area I am weak in and wish to get better. I have always valued 2D and design skills as an important counterpart to my 3D.

By the end of day 3 I had all the core components of my character that I wanted to include, but it still wasn’t looking right. The Dirty bomb style was just not evident. But at least now I had a solid starting point. After chatting with both tutors and colleagues I got some valuable feedback. First major point is dirty bomb characters tend to wear very urban clothing with lots of “soft” materials, even the armour tends to be padded. Second important design point is the balance between detailed interest area’s and rest areas. The last major point was the readability in the values and designs, almost like graphic design.

Now by the end of the working week I am at a point that I can be happy with, I have a good idea of what I am doing and what purpose it will serve. I would work over the weekend to make up for my indecisiveness during the week but I will be away, hopefully it will give me a break and allow me to think over all my designs and feedback for Monday.

Next week I plan to fix the anatomy and get going on the high poly starting from big to small, then hopefully spend the weekend retoping and unwrapping. A big focus of this project for me is materials and texturing so I really want to save the last week for texturing, This is going to be difficult as I have already burnt through the first week but hopefully enough crunch I can prevail with the original plan.

Lastly I also had a quick conversation with my tutor on FMP ideas as I feel really lost in that department. The main point of his feedback was decide an area, in my case characters. Decide a style you like, in my case realistic and finally decide on a company/project you would want to work on and for me that would be creative assembly. So now the idea is that I pick a current or upcoming creative assembly title and make a variant of that using the previous projects as a benchmark. Much like using dirty bomb as a guide this is really helpful in giving me a target, a guide and a bit of creative freedom. For me this is the perfect recipe of efficiency vs. creativity in a kind of harmonious balance.