Back In The Saddle

And we're back-First day of uni. An abundance of briefs to choose from too, it's great! Anything you want to specialise in, you can do it now. Even just 2D or 3D solely. You're thinking, great, Chris loves 2D he'll pick a 2D concepting brief. Maybe. Not yet though. I've kind of worn out the 2D side of me recently so I've opted for the realistic character brief. At least initially; You have to choose three disciplines overall which makes it quite inevitable that I'll end up doing a 2D brief at some point. So we do three projects each over a three week period, so all the projects would have been done in nine weeks. We get an extra week spare to polish. It's all about portfolio building and having an online presence. One of the reasons why my blog will be moving to a more professional looking site to show off my work in a more presentable light. Beyond making a snazzy rhyme it really will look an awful lot better trying to show off my work on a site that's more tailored towards it.

So, I have chosen the realistic character brief for my initial project. 30k tri count, 2x2048s. Not bad at all. The character is an NPC so not really doing much other than telling the player where to go. And this NPC needs to be wearing a helmet and exist bearing a few materials; Cloth, metal and plastic if I remember correctly. I'm pretty sure this is to help show off more hard surface modelling and how good we are at different materials. The brief also states that the entire theme is determined by you so it can be a space ninja or a viking as long as it wears a helmet. Thematically, I went for the old Mad Max route the sort of post nuclear Fallout world. The theme is rather lenient-you can just throw a few things together and have them work. Those things being the materials that the brief states. It's stated quite clearly also that the character isn't the point of the project. It's just about the modelling and texturing. It could potentially be a wheelie bin. Here's what I came up with today.

This is essentially what I want to model with maybe less boobage and an actual helmet. Obviously this is an image and is in no way my work.

After scouting around a bit at post apocalyptic cosplayers I highlighted a few pieces I wanted to incorporate. So the fur from the second guy in. Fur is quite a difficult material but I think I've pretty much sussed it after taking a hint from the way Shadow of Mordor did it. Essentially just a displacement map, tesselated. I'm yet to see how this would hit the framerate and the polycount though, so we'll see. Regarding the other images, I liked the hair from the brotherhood of steel lady and the clunky asymmetrical armour of the chap on the far right. The image right in the middle, the man looks like he's wearing some sort of gimp mask which could look awfully entertaining  as a material if it's done right. I find it quite difficult to imagine what this character would look like so I bashed them all together briefly.

Chains, fur, gimp masks and gas masks. Then I read the part in the brief where it said no weapons.

Also the character had no plastic in it's diet as I wasn't aware I wanted the underlying structure of the helmet to be a plastic mask. So I stuck on a rather shoddy looking street cone as armour.
And that's the end of the brief concept just to help me understand what the hell is going on. Which should be more than enough help as I've already gone full throttle into zbrush with my base mesh. Base because it's such a basic mesh, heh.

That's all for now,
Cheers!