After the 12 weeks of concept development, i started entirely from scatch with no previous skills and then had to build up a character, prop and environment to atleast a recognisable style, taking lighting in to full concideration. I am rather happy with the results as a huge leap has been made from original concepts, leading on to the finished products.
Character Sheet
Designing and then bringing my character to life was an
extremely tedious and time consuming task. Even with all the previous research
and development, It was fairly daunting in terms of scale. I had to re-draw my
entire character with a bulkier and more proportioned body as the previous
concepts had far too many flaws the salvage. They were on the right path
though.
For the Character sheet with the front, back and side pose,
I spent a lot of time just looking at poses on the internet, including Davin
chi’s interpretation of the human body, attempting to take all of this in to
account before physically drawing my character. Using all this information,
including the height in heads, I managed to draw a front view which looked very
similar to the original concept but with larger muscles and more structure.
After rubbing out the guidelines, I re-drew over all the
defining lines which left me with a basis to work with. Using this, I could
then run lines across the paper to set proportions to work with for the back
and side views. Using the same techniques, I drew both the back and side views
with the original back concept as a reference guide.
I could then put it all in to Photoshop and begin to add
definition. For this, I took a picture of each drawing, cropped them on an A3
sheet and began to add shading. This was by far the most time consuming but
also rewarding bridge to cross as I simply could not image the characters in 3D
from my flat sketch. After a lot of practise in various areas such as the
character emotions I began to feel more comfortable with the shading in general
and could begin to add highlights to state where the light hit the character
and when the shadows then derived.
After doing this for all three sketches, I was able to
create a simple colour overlay with a mix of reds and oranges to add a bit of
life. The only problem I had at this stage was that my character looked a bit
too clean for his swampy setting so I added a mix between greys, browns and
greens to simulate the wear and tear of his life.
For the finished touches I then began to overlay different
scale textures, adapting and merging them in an attempt to add a bit of detail
to each pose. After a lot of trial and error, I was finally left with something
I was relatively happy to call my finished product but proportion wise, a few
issues were still present.
This was near impossible to fix in the timeframe though due
to my work process as I would have had to re-draw it in sketchpad format and
then re-import it in to Photoshop with hopes of it then working after
re-shading the entire pose.
Beauty Shot
The beauty shot followed the exact same techniques as the
character sheet from start to finish, starting with a sketchpad which then
ended in Photoshop. I did run in to quite a few issues whilst finding and then
drawing a suitable pose as anything I attempted to draw felt out of proportion
due to the slightly off perspective. Eventually I managed to draw a pose of him
twisting his body and extending his right arm in more of a stretching manor but
the face became incredibly problematic.
Drawing the face at a perspective view felt near impossible
and it took many attempts and studying to arrive at the face within the image,
even if the muzzle is probably twice as long as it should be.
Shading wise, it felt rather awkward with the twisted pose
to produce realistic lighting and shadow without leaning to either side to the
point of overwhelming and then blocking out the original colour. After a fair
few attempts, I managed to create a lighting layer which added a suitable level
of depth to the sketch.
With the general colour a texturing, I followed the exact
same set of steps as with the character sheet and played around with different
colour intensities until it looked roughly the same. The only thing I was
forced to do differently texture wise was to scale it up slightly and overlay a
duplicate with a slight off-set to match the odd angle of the pose. Overall, I
believe that the face could be improved greatly and the colours could be more
concentrated but due to time limitations, this was not possible in time for the
presentation.
Expressions
For my character’s expressions I first looked at a lot of my
previous sketches, including the incredibly happy and over-enthusiastic sketch
I completed previously. As I drew four separate expressions, it was by far the
most time consuming part of the entire project, especially as I drew each face
entirely from scratch on A3 pieces of paper, making them as large as physically
possible in hopes of created an incredibly detailed and defined end product.
This worked greatly to my advantage in the long run but involved
at least ten hours of work on each expression. This is due to the two hour
period required to create and define the line art, the hour taken to then
simply shade each face and then the remainder to draw each scale entirely by
hand.
Once these were completed in sketch form, I then took a
picture of each one and placed them in Photoshop with the same workflow as the
previous character sheets/ beauty shots, layering low opacity black and white
brushes on top of an overlay layer to make each face stick out from the page.
After all this shading was fully completed, I was able to simply overlay all
the basic colour on top of the shadow and general lighting to add the final
definition.
As I had drawn the texture by hand before putting each
drawing in to Photoshop, I did not need to use any photo-overlays which would
have sped up the process greatly but not left me with such a fine end result.
I regards to the eyes, I began watching counters video and
written tutorials in an attempt to make the wet-looking reptilian eye, crossed
with a humans. Eventually I found a technique of layering different coloured
circles with blur effects and fine drawn detail which combined to make a
photo-realistic result.
Full workflow;
Happy and Sad Closeups. - Detailed.
Normal and Generally Under the Weather. - Detailed.
Prop Sheet
When designing the final idea for my prop, I looked back at
a lot of the previous concepts that I had created, settling entirely on the
home-made bag idea. After a few experimentations, I decided to re-visit my
original concept and vastly increased/ improved the detail. The original was
simply a refined square with a few construction lines to specify where each
component would be located so I had to refine each edge, giving it a more
fabric feel, draw in details such as the tears in the leather and blunting
outline each defining area so it would be ready for Photoshop. I could then use
the base drawing to carry out line across, making it much easier to then draw
the back and side views with the same level of quality.
Once I was entirely ready to Photoshop them, I took a close
up picture of each pose and then cropped them on an A3 canvas to give me enough
room to work with, detail wise. The next step as with the character sheet was
to define the shape and dynamics using a black and white layer which I used to
draw in the light and dark areas with a hard brush. It felt rather difficult to
define the shape with the lighting I chose but after a lot of trial and error
combined with a few thinner black lines, I was able to shade each image to a
standard where I could then add texture and basic colour to really bring them
to life.
As I had not physically drawn the texture in within the
sketch, after adding the base colours I had to use quite a few photo-overlays
to add the leathery effect to each component of the bag. The drawing was
suitable with only base colour to be titled an end product due to the shading
but the combination of hard and rough leather combined really made each view
stand out. Using the techniques we learnt in the Intro to 3D for texturing, I was
able to pass the skill set directly on to the prop to make something that I was
relatively proud of.
The beauty shot followed the exact same premise from start
to end as the prop sheet but with a lot more detail added in areas such as
shading and the base sketch. The base sketch I used once again was an original
concept but with a lot more detail added in areas such as the tears in the
leather and the strap and general details which really make the concept. This
was a much more time consuming task to ensure that the original shading was
done correctly but after many hours of dedication, I was able to make it look
almost fully 3D. Using the texturing I had picked out and adapted from the prop
sheet, the texturing became a very fast and highly rewarding process.
The Environment
The environment was the largest task I worked on in terms of
the scale of a single image and felt incredibly overwhelming to start with but
by utilising the same work structure of going from sketch, to shading, to
colour and then finishing off with texture really helped simplify the process. When
I first focused on the concept, I wanted to create an area that my character
could have once called home but with a more wore down atmosphere so it feels as
if it has aged alongside my character.
After doing both quick and long sketches of what I hoped to
achieve as mentioned in the original presentation, I found a setting which I wanted
to develop further, this being a partially flooded swamp with the remains of an
old stone structure, rotten planks and a large focus point in the form of a
tree which I could detail with the age of the entire scene.
Drawing this up was not too difficult a task as I felt
comfortable enough with a sketchpad to put my ideas on to paper to a level
which I could then build up from. Perspective wise, I ran in to a few issues
which I found very challenging to overcome, especially once I put the sketchpad
down and began adding colour and shadow.
I left this task until I had completely finished my
character sheet and expressions so I felt confident enough with the shading to
add what looked like sun glare and drop shadows to each of the protruding
rocks, both in the water and on the ground. It may have taken a fair bit of tweaking
but through multiple layers, I was eventually able to produce a greyscale image
which looked as if it had quite a lot of depth to it, even down to the contract
in the water, blurring it to the sides to simulate the slightly unsettled water
surface.
The next step was then to add in the basic colour to the
image on an overlay layer, allowing me to define the details to the point where
the overall concept was highly recognisable and I could see it starting to come
together. Having the colour separated on to another layer helped me greatly
when it came down to getting the correct tones as I could simply experiment and
add whatever colours I wished to test on different layers with a hard brush.
One I got the full colour scheme which the merged in with the shading, I could
add the final touch-ups with a small, hard brush as well as with the use of
multiple photo overlays to add the defining texture.
Simply texturing this image became the most time consuming
task as I went through a near finite number of source images, even taking my
own of wood bark to try and get a pattern which added both depth and a rough
detail to each area of the image. This worked exceptionally well the trees
after a huge amount f trial and error, playing around a lot with the hue and
saturation settings as well as different ways of using both the blur and clone
stamp tools to create something unique, even adding my own moss texture under
the water in an attempt to make the water look shallow.
This combined with the heavy lighting made it look like more
of a deep puddle than an endless ocean which made it very successful,
especially with my original fears of it generally looking un-natural. If I was
able to spend a bit more time working on the image, I would have liked to re-do
the stone structures as I could not find a nice mix between texture and shading
which really brought them out, making them look rather out of place in areas.
The angle of these rocks was quite difficult and ended up
making it look as if they sunk through the ground at an abrupt angle but due to
the scene, I think this was still relatively manageable. Overall, for my first
real attempt at an environment, I think it turned out quite nice but would have
not have been possible without the lighting and shading skills I developed
early on within the course.
No comments:
Post a Comment