Mind to Matter - Character Concept #1

SOOOOO. If you read my last post you probably can guess what this is about and yes I am sharing a design of a character I have been sketching up which is for our courses next module "From Concept to Prototype".

Disclaimer Any designs shared on this post DO belong to me so if you steal it in anyway i am going to make you feel worse than Kim Kardashian having battle against a make-up remover and loosing.  Gunna copyright this shit.

So The Cumbria Game Design students of 2014 - 2017 where all given a genre, and yes I was not the lucky sod that got fantasy or sci-fi (those are my babies <3) Lol seriously I didn't which I am glad about because I wanted to do something a little different, my genre being Gangs and Crime. So with that in mind like cops and robbers I firstly decided on what should my character be good or bad, obviously I chose good #toomainstream. Yes that was a hash tag. So establishing that I took a concept of a police force and thought of something like a vigilante police force called the Armed Intervention Initiative (A.I.I). So this is a police force that fight crime with whatever weapon they specialize with. But instead of judging based on situation anyone involved the scene of a crime will meet their fate with something that will cut or shoot their way into their flesh. Fight fire with fire.

- To fight monster we must become monsters even if it means abandoning our humanity - Armin Arlert - Attack on Titan.

So now we have a little back story on what I wanted my character to be involved in I drew 5 different initial ideas where the character was different in each picture with their own personality traits all inspired by other heroes from other video game/ movies but with a more Daniel J Stanley touch... and glitter. So simply I wanted the character to have a little bit of swerve, or style to his stance and outfit, hence the huge ass coats and collars. The stances of each character gives of a symbol of their characteristics, giving them a bit more individuality.

The left character was an idea of basic english undercover cop with the typical leather jacket.
The center character was inspired by the arrow. Cheers I know the artwork with him is 10 times better

So on the left we have the stereotypical american detective with the trench coat.
The centre was an military crossed with detective look hence the waist coat and cargos.
The lazy shit on the left was more of John Mc'lain inspired with that carefree persona. Must admit he's cool.

So I went for the hooded bad ass dude. What was next I decided to give this set of articulated pencil lines some personality and a bit of a back story.

Me stringing some ideas together to get some sort of personality drawn together

So I stole the middle name from a friend for this, this is Darcy I wanted a name that isn't a regular name as this ouch of the bunch of ideas I had had the most character, and c'mon Darcy the ninja dude. SO, I decided to give him the back story of his family being killed in his young teens, and he sought revenge which he claimed but wanted to do more for the society he lived in, making it a safer place. However he finally got his revenge by killing the murderers, now what's interesting about this although he claimed his vengeance, it wasn't enough so he helped form the Armed Intervention Initiative with a few other members to justify his love for claiming the lives of those who tamper with innocent lives or the graceful society he dreams of building. He is practically emotionless unless he is slicing the shit out of some street thug with his fine blade or shooting the living daylights out of gang-bangers, those will be the only times he will be smiling or even laughing, so yes this character is bit of a "goody too messed up"

His role within the A. I. I is to go undercover and workout crime before they happen, protection through prevention. He also does a lot of intervention through stealth and assassination style killing. Making him the spy, there is a reason to the hood!

Someone's been hitting Primark like a boss, serious these are some clothing designs I made.
The middle is just a trench coat/ hood instead of basic hoodie.
The GEEZA on the right is a more hero based look, cape, armour no hood, yes this guy has a face.

Just concept art to give the idea what he is like in combat

His inventory, he uses 4 tomahawks, a U.S.P handgun/ silencer and a katana sword
His boots have springs attach which connect to his ankles which allow him for high jumps/landings
Also he has seen the lovely day of combat with all them scars on his body

So now my lovely people we have his base image, his back story, his personality, his outfit, his inventory and even a show reel of his skills for future employment in the policing career, so there is one final thing to do, the final product a synopsis.

Darcy the enforcer who carries the lust for blood of those inherit the name of villainy, sweeps the shadows and strikes before crime has a chance to retaliate. If you want a fight, he'll bring a war. The only thing keeping him sane is the dream for street peace and the flowing existence of thuggery. - narrator of the game or me..

So to finish off, here are the final finished drawings of my sketchy creation.

Front View

Side View

Thank you for viewing this blog, I hope you enjoyed! Also I ain't a professional artist but any constructive criticism is welcome, peace.

A Designer's Nightmare - From Mind to Matter

Well hello again you lovely bunch of peoples and today's topic is a bit more of a talky blog about getting an image from someone's brain on to that scrappy bit of paper we call a draft. Now being under the label of "Designer" anyone with this label strapped to them can empathize about how much of a pain in the ass a customer can be when they are trying to describe an idea you come up with a concept to match and they turn around and say it's not right about 300 times when following their strict instructions, fussy gits.

On Friday our lovely class just started a module called "From Concept to Prototype" Now this module if you understand design language is about getting an idea and going through stupid amounts of redesign and then eventually once you finalised and chosen what concept you go with you start construction or use if you're a graphic designer/ illustrator, the concept you use. In game design we call this the prototype. But this applies to anything you build for the first time so make as you will.

So at the start of the lecture our lecturer wanted us to draw a character which he verbally gave us instructions on which he wanted it to look like, Most of the instructions where very... interesting. However I will list the directions he gave

• Girraffe head with 8 Horns and a small neck.
• A Barrel for a body, like an oil drum thing
• Robotic tenticles? - Octermingiraffinator? WTF?
• Followed by stilts for legs. - yep.
• And to finish it off big chunky walking boots. #Fabulous

So this is funny, and it caused a giggle but actually seeing some of the class' work actually amazed me to the point I would stick this abomination of a character in some sort of game. 

Secondly our lecturer gave us another concept but in pure words, we would just describe as a fat Bruce Willis thug guy who loved his mumma's shoe collection.. yes we had to give him sexy prada shoes. This thug obviously loves Jimmy Choo, yes. I did another funny.

Now moving onto the third concept. Our lecturer let one of our class sit in the hot seat and describe a random character concept, and obviously my desperation for attention meant I was going to volunteer myself, so I did and I found myself in front of 22 people hoping I was going to say something normal for a change, and my god, did I disappoint them.

So firstly, my messed up concept, I chose to give the lizard head a cute "tiger main" which I was so lovely corrected that it was lions that have mains. So I repeat a gecko lizard head with a tiger main, with cute little tiny cat eyes. So I patiently let people draw that before blurting out my next idea which was a carrot body (yes the orange vegetable you heard me correct) with mechanics on it's body in the shape of a smiley face. Crazy eh? Then I decided to attach two huge Terminator arms to the the walking death carrot. Don't mess with this bitch or it will mess with you. Moving on from his overly HENCH robotic arms, I decided to give him human like legs with the lovely asset of shorts. And to finish this fashion- challenged death carrot, I decided to give him a lovely pair of kinky high heel boots. Yes. I even got the pleasure of naming this vegetable beast. Yes I named it Hashtag Janet, Hashtag as a word not a symbol. 

Alex Stockwell AKA Savamther - A design from my mind, very bad ass. 

Now after seeing what everyone created it was exciting to see how all these different styles and looks of the same character concept I came up with on the spot. Now the interesting thing was how many classmates questioned the concept into detail and the amount of times I said to everyone; "you can choose" because I kept missing out the little details that in which I will call the 'Designer' needed in order to come up with the perfect design. This is where the title A Designers Nightmare comes into it. How can people come up with the correct concept if you miss the little details. And where designers can empathise with me you need all the details to project something from the mind and put it into a sketch or concept. The moral of the story, if you're going to get something designed, know what you want because Game Designers, Graphic Designers, Interior Designers and even Make-up Designers, we are not mind readers. If you're not happy be more specific.

Ayrton Scanlan's - Carrot Demon from hell... Or my mind...

And as much fun the lecture was, I learned that details are the bits that count. Because missing details will piss off anyone thats a designer. Unless you're not a fussy git (like me). Then using the imagination is also fun :D

A fine Carrotation By Libby Nixon, she read my mind,
and then judged me. https://www.facebook.com/LNixonArts

Zara Abbas - If Jaxx from Mortal Kombat was a Karrot and cross-dressing. This would be him.

Thanks for reading I hope you enjoyed this blog update I just wanted to thank my class mates in the FDA of game design for giving me the chance to explore this way of thinking, and a special thanks to Libby Nixon, Ayrton Scanlan, Zara Abbas and Alex Stockwell for letting me use their designs as examples of my concept for this blog. Peace.

Check out Libby's Art page I can guarantee you will not be disappointed. https://www.facebook.com/LNixonArts

Banking In Style - A Digital Replica, Kind of...

I think it is safe to say I don't want to see a bank unless it is giving me money after this project. I joke, in my opinion this is one of the best models I have created, very stylish very square and very traditional. I have this dire passion to just create 3D models and having this passion during the module helped a lot, because i kept changing how I wanted the building to look. In this blog I plan on talking you through the processes and my thoughts and choices I made when i constructed this "digital replica" of the Lloyds TSB building which is stationed in Carlisle Cumbria. and it looks like something like this:

Lloyds TSB - Carlisle, this is the blueprint I used thanks to Sam Crabtree on my course as my photo was the wrong format, this image allowed me to make the model as accurate as possible by following it as a 2D design. (credit where it's due)

Now if you are local to the guy who writes these posts for your pleasure then the chances are you have seen this building, its a very intricate building with plenty of places to annoy someone who is planning to re-create this in a digital format.

So getting to the point. Our class was set something called "The Industry Brief" and as brief as it sounds we were limited to a 5000 poly count or lower. If you don't know what "polys" are then they are the little squares that create the image and moulded to the desired shape, think of atoms  in the real world and the polys in the animation world, very similar. We had 1 month to do this and that meant a lot of complaints about christmas being cut short however we only had to model the front. (Thank God).

The front of the cash wielding building - shame it doesn't share...

Nearly the whole thing on a weird angle

So my first design choice was to build the base structure of the building (the walls, pillars and then the roof. After doing that the next design plan was to float all details of the building, this is where the details like window cills, door frames and other small building details, although the finished product is one object, its made from lots of other (smaller) modelled objects and then attached together just like Lego.

So into the nitty gritty we have to put this into perspective, we were told to concentrate on the most detail at the bottom and only not as much at the top. Why? because the model is being marked by the makers of the FORZA series. So imagine being in a car racing at 60 miles per hour and driving past the TSB building, you are only going to see what is close to you as you are concentrating on the road and the chances are, you wont even look at the top. This being a factor and a very limited on the poly limit meant we had to choose what would be a silhouetted and which details would actually be modelled, as you can see I chose door frames, window frames/ cills and the bottom of the pillars. The mini pillars on top of the building and the top of the columns on the side of the building have less modelling detail due to the poly limit and was a design choice to leave it to texture rather then spend valuable polys modelling something the audience may or may not see and which required more polys than the limit allows me to spare.

Mini pillars are the cute little things that don't do anything other than make the building look pretty

I had fun modelling these little gits. Not.

Something that is more of a personal taste thing than anything but what annoys me about a lot of video games is that window panes are normally done as textures unless it is vital to the game like you travel through it or it gets smashed, but most of the time it is literally one poly with a picture of some panes and some glass. So I decided to model the window panes and extrude the windows inside to get the details. It just gives the building some life and realism rather then the blank slate look, I promised I wont make a Kardashian reference when speaking of a blank slate... oh wait I just did.

lol window

Even more windows.

I will say this I know this isn't what would be considered industry standard work, I have only been 3D modelling for 4 months, which is the time I have been on my course but finishing this piece of work not only motivated me for my future career but I cannot wait to see what challenges are going to be thrown my way, I think i have to just took my next big step into modelling an adventure. (here's a little bit of extra cheese to satisfy you dairy monsters).

On an off note check out my Instagram to keep up to date with images of work or other things: Cyberdan6 Peace.

20 Minutes of Experimenting on Chief - A Mini Project

So yes the word to define my love for Master-Chief would be obsessed. Good now we got that out the way I decided to do a couple of digital drawings and paper drawings of my favourite spartan(s) and yes Noble 6 deserves some credit too. I plan to keep this post not as talky but just a quick gallery of some of my child like experimental drawings and tell you my ides behind them so you my lovely reader get to decide whether they are fit enough to wipe your bottoms with, or not.

So on a random day at university I was speaking to one of the lovely second years, and he was modelling this bad-ass armour dude, so with excitement of wanting to be good as him at modelling I delved a little further into his work and yes I did ask if I could take a peep at his concept art. Some of the drawings where done with a paint or colour and all the line work was painted on in ink afterwards. So with the quality of his work and thinking about the style of doing a background layer of colour of the object and then fine lining afterwards I decided to do some experiments of this but with felt tip pens, ink and photoshop.

The First - Not great a little rushed but then so was the evacuation of Reach

I gave myself 20 minutes for each image just because I am experimenting. So remember these are not what we would consider 'industry standard' so don't bee cheeky.

The Second of my experiment, God I feel like Haisley

Firstly i would start by colouring the intended shape, Spartan 117 is green so I coloured the body in the intended pose followed by the visor which is a honeycomb orange. Then once you have your dashes of colour I either got that sexy black felt tip pen or my posh parker ink and just lined him out and gave him some details. 

The same goes for my photoshop versions excepti just used black paint with the brush on the boldest setting (or whatever you graphic designers call it) with soft brushes being the filler and yes I did the shaping first then the fine-lining and details afterwards same as before.

Halo 5 is going to be HOLY! - see what I did there?

Also just a quick heads up the blog for my first professional looking 3D model will be posted in 4 or so days, so if you are moist to see the capabilities I potentially have for this industry then is the perfect time to see what this geek can do.

Halo 3? We all loved Halo 3

Disclaimer - I don't own the rights to halo this is simply for the enjoyment of the viewers and myself

Another disclaimer wiping your bottom with regular paper would be painful so don't take my talking in a literal sense, thanks.

Buttons With a Hint of Style: A Prototype Website

Helvetica? Check. Red font? Check. A metal background? Maybe? Does it look like a panel taken from a transformer? Indeed. Does it have more buttons than the starship enterprise? Wait! Nothing can have more buttons than the starship enterprise.

If you are not aware already my course the Art of Game Design at the University of Cumbria have given us the task to build ourselves a website/ online portfolio to hold a gallery of all our work we will be creating in the next few years. So we all get down and try and add a little personal touch to creating our employment weapon which will hopefully shot competitors in the face so we get the job of our dreams. So as you most likely guessed I wanted to go for a mechanical look, like a panel of a beautifully filed terminator, just without the screws. 

So yes you are already thinking where i am going with this idea or my thoughts, well I am a visual person so the first thing I like to see is pictures, or moving images when I first go onto a webpage, so using these rollover images to give the viewer a sense of communication while not taking the eyes away from the centre, and yes my little sketch of Jehuty from Zone of the Enders is rather fab, don't you think?

Now look above, now down, then above! Then BACK TO ME! Just kidding. I created 2 galleries one for my 3DS max work (models) and the other for my artwork (2D photoshop and sketch concepts). As you see again when you look at the page the first thing you will see is one of the thumbnails enlarged, Again visual people like thinks that are visual. So I decided shoving a picture in your face would be the best way to interest the viewer with my work. However, you won't be able to see all of the image unless you scroll down, and that's where my cute little thumbnails sit.

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Now the fabulous thing about my thumbnails is that when clicked they change the main image being displayed. Done even in a fun way where it fades into the changed image, my friends the power of Java scripting. If you don't know what Java scripting is, it's giving certain elements in a webpage behaviours like movement, change in size, highlighting, fade/ appear and even the combination of any of these like my image swap and appear. I felt this would work better than a button to choose previous or next because a website should give the viewer complete freedom and nothing spells freedom like thumbnails that change (or GTA).

The Blog page and About me page is basically the same as the homepage except with text and a photo of me so I will leave it to your imagination to visualize what they possibly look like.

As for the website as a whole this is merely the first creation of a prototype and an upcoming war against dreamweaver to come up with new ideas of a perfect website for me. However any feedback is welcome. Also a little note to those who are building websites with Dreamweaver, don't freak its just as stupid as Adobe illustrator, so cut it some slack. Peace.