Concept Design - Characters

visual design

Throughout this year I have learnt a lot about character design and how to turn my character ideas into a reality through drawing, both on paper and through photoshop. It's important to first understand what type of character you're going to create and what their personality is so you know what impression you want the drawing to have. From this I can then take inspiration from other artists who draw in a certain style to represent the character that I'm trying to portray.

I like to draw my initial ideas on paper:
Concept for an insectoid - maraca playing Treehopper

Concept for YouTube banner art

Concept for a scary book character

Concept for a scary book character
After sketching the designs in my sketch book it's actually very simple to get them into a digital form. Simply scan them in and, using Adobe Illustrator, you can use the live trace option to turn the drawings into vector art images which you can then put back into photoshop to carry on working with over the top.
My sketch turned into vector art



Characterised Tree - Street Scene

visual design
I wanted to create a scene that resembled an illustrated style of old children's books that might bring back nostalgia in people when viewing the picture. Because of this I didn't want to add too many textures or in depth detail to keep it looking a bit more cartoon-like.



I also wanted it to be slightly eerie for the viewer so used John Kenn Mortensen as inspiration to keep a more sketched look to the style of the overall drawing.
One of John Kenn Mortensen's drawings
The tree was to go into this overall scene of a 'haunted street', made to be drawn in an illustrative style that would suit well for a creepy ghost story for a children's book. I tried to keep myinspiration of the sketch style throughout the image by adding cross hatching to the darkest parts of the house in the middle as well as the trees and fence.

Photoshop Animation for 'Projection Mapping'

animation
Taking my original learning of Photoshop animation I used it to create a 'projection map' of animations happening over the top of real-world objects so that it looked as though the animation was actually interacting with what it was being projected onto.

First of all I played around with drawing directly onto a subject and seeing how it could alter the look of the real-world model:

Then I took a picture of a real-world model that I knew would stay perfectly still and used that image as a reference to create my photoshop animation over the top of using the animation timeline. From this I was then able to line up the projection with my animation easily and play the animation over the object, having it appear as through the animation was interacting with it:
A beating heart gif that I drew, animated and projected onto myself
Picture that I took for reference of the animation in the video below

See the projection mapped animation over on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4orW7nQEgw&feature=youtu.be

Photoshop Animation

animation
In lesson we learnt how to use the animation timeline to create a frame by frame animation and then export it into a gif. Below is my first attempt at doing so:
We got the template of a girl walking in a loop and I added, frame by frame, the fire ball which eventually sets her hair on fire. I had to be conscious of moving the flames to adjust to the bobbing of her body walking up and down.

Cuppa Team - Compromising to Meet Deadlines

Cuppa Team
At the beginning of this process my team and I had many grand ideas for this game: jumping through wormholes to unveil another time-dimension, included an animated narrative at the beginning of the game, allowing the player a choice in what ship they wanted to choose and much, MUCH more!

But unfortunately we only had 8 weeks to complete this game and to reach this deadline we had to make plenty of compromises!

One of these compromises was a health code that my team mat Sam Loader and I were trying to implement within the last couple of weeks. We attempted many different ways, looking at YouTube for tutorials and Unity forums for help. 
However we just didn't have enough time to debug why it was throwing errors and ultimately had to get scrapped. We had already set up a GUI element for the Health status as we wanted it to go down in percentages on the bottom left hand side of the screen but had to later delete this and the code entirely to have a clean build.

We also realised that, with this unit as well as our other two units, Visual Design and 3D modelling, we didn't have as much time as we had originally anticipated to create all of the assets that would have been needed for the alternate time-dimension, as we would have had to make a duplicate of every one asset. So instead we scrapped that idea entirely and left the game as a simple space shooter.

Overall, the game wasn't what we had originally anticipated at all but it's better to have a simple and completed game than an overly complex one full of bugs and lag. That is not a very good experience for the user at all!

Cuppa Team - Developing the Game (Art)

Cuppa Team
As our game was a 2.5D one we had to have 3D modelled assets. For those who were modelling these assets they needed our original space ship concepts turned into model reference sheets for them to work from so they could create something that we all are agreed upon. Model reference sheets are basically just the ship from 3 main angles: top, side and front.

Here is my model sheet for the alien enemy ship:
I also included the colour scheme that I was using in reference to when I created this to give the modeller something to work with. This was not, however, the final texture that we decided upon. From this model sheet though the 3D modeller was then able to create a brilliant model (Sam Loader):

As well as this I also helped out with the concept art, drawing some asteroids as well as creating the space sky background for the game:



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