week 18

As the character project progresses we start to delve into the concepting stage of our project. However before we actually start concepting, in visual design we were given a lesson on how to make strong moodboards. From attending this session I started to see how weak my moodboards were as compared to what they should be in fact. Below is an image of one of my earliest moodboards on the course.

As you can tell above there is no annotation to suggest where I am going or what in fact I want to design. In addition there is little organisation with my images as one can see that there are images of Celtic artwork scattered around and mixed in with images of rocks. From this session of moodboard design in visual design I had learnt that essentially a moodboard needs to communicate where I am going and what is it I am attempting to produce. This should as a result produce a stronger idea for what I am designing as I get more involved with the images I am taking reference from and start to understand each of the traits I would like to use to produce my concept. Below is my moodboard for the current character project.

As you can see it’s larger in scale, it’s broken up into sections to organise the layout better as well as to allow me a sense of ease of access when scrolling through. This will allow me to pick up areas that I find interesting and strong and use them as inspiration for my paintovers and photobashes. Moreover there is annotation for me to get my ideas on paper and for me to refer to in the future if say I go off tangent with what I am attempting to accomplish. Comparing these two moodboards together I feel reflects my progression on the course, I would like to say I have started to become more detailed and open in my approach to designing concepts as you can see in my paintovers I have produced this week.

During the paintovers I produced paintovers of myself older using what I have learnt
from studying facial anatomy to aid my rendering

In addition to moodboards this week Mike elaborated on producing paintovers and photobashes. Using the orthographics we took of ourselves last week I produced a range of paintovers for my character. Essentially I wanted to develop a Moorish barber surgeon type character. To reflect this in my character I made a second moodboard consisting of Moorish clothing and barber surgeon accessories and attempted to mash them together in my design. This way it should communicate to audiences that one my character is a moor but also my character has a medical background.

Whilst I was producing these designs I started to notice that the silhouette of my designs weren’t particularly strong. As a result of this I added a black colour overlay onto the paintovers to make into a silhouette and then work into them producing a stronger design. I quite enjoyed producing these paintover concepts, they opened my eyes to how efficient and quick it is to create a readable design.

Game production

This week there was no formal game production lesson instead our tutor came over to check up on how we are doing as well as give us a brief introduction to limb deformation. I was quite disappointed that our tutor didn’t spend time to elaborate on how we could achieve good limb deformation in our models as this is not an area we have practised and seeing as we are to rig our models admittedly I am quite scared. However I think I should get stuck in make mistakes and learn from them.

Critical studies

Just like game production there was no formal lecture/seminar however instead we were treated to a guest lecture by DMUGA alumni who have gone on to work in the field. I really do feel as if I have benefitted from attending this lecture. It put some things in perspective namely how to improve and do well on the course. One thing I really took from this lecture was that it’s okay to make mistakes because particularly with 3d we are just starting out as I think Del said it (one of our guest lecturers) there’s no way we can be good if we are just starting out, we have loads of time to get better.

This statement is something that I’m going to take in account when approaching future projects.