Dichotomous Character Project Submission

Dichotomous Character Submission

February 10, 2016

Name: Katie Byrne

P Number: P1413266x

Email: p1413266x@myemail.dmu.acuk

Project (The brief you are writing for):

Dichotomous Character Project

Summary (Brief Summary of processes involved in Concepting/Modelling/Unwrapping/Texturing/Engine):

A four week project where the student has to concept a pair of dichotomous characters. The main character must be a human and the secondary character may be anything. Both characters must be concepted but only the main character is required to be modelled for submission. Final assets must be baked down from high poly to be under 15,000 tris and use 2048x2048 texture sheets.

Visual Studies:

I started the project by making multiple moodboards to decide on what exactly I wanted to do. I first of all looked at existing examples of dichotomous characters, such as well known ones like Ash and Pikachu, Wallace and Gromit, Mario and Luigi, Ratchet and Clank, and many others. I decided that I quite liked the idea of a main character and a companion, such as in Digimon and Pokemon. From this I decided that I wanted to create a sorceress with a companion, which I chose would be a frog/toad. I made a moodboard for inspiration featuring mages and sorceresses, and also one with toads to help me decide on a theme. I decided I was going to create a nice and bright sorceress and ugly and pessimistic toad for contrast.

These are a slection of my silohuettes that I had drawn for my characters, I selected the designs shown in the right hand corner to use to develop further.

This image shows value studies of my initial designs for the characters. However I wasn't too happy with these as the sorceress herself looked quite evil. Along with this the I was told that the Toad needed to be humanoid, contradicting what I had previously been told about the secondary character, so I decided to redesign both characters to suit my ideas better.

These colour studies show my newly designed characters which fit the original design much better. The frog is now a humanoid which stands on his hind legs, and the sorceress has a new more friendly outfit and value range. I quite liked bright purples and blues, but decided to go with a more toned down white and light pink/purple theme as it reflected better on the image I wanted the character to portray. I chose darker muddy colours for the Toad.

The image above shows my final concept design for the two characters, complete with colour. I would have liked to have added more detail and props to the design, but at this stage of the project I had already redesigned my character once and was lacking time to do so again, I think the characters work quite well being simplistic however so I was not overly bothered by this.

These are some quick orthographic sketches of my character to be used for modelling references throughout the project.

Game Production:

Final renders of my Sorceress character.

PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR SKETCHFAB SCENE!!!

Conclusion (Brief paragraph on how you think the project turned out/Self Critique/ Include 4 ways in which your work could be improved):​

I am in two minds about this project. I have learned many things, such as developed my understanding of ZBrush further, and have learned to use 3D-Coat and Topogun for re-topologising and also painting straight onto the model rather than the texture sheet as a different alternative to standard texturing. I was quite pleased with how my model turned out, though I would have liked to of added some more interesting props if I had the time to do so. I also would have liked to have rigged the character but I didn't have time for this either. Even though I can tell there is a vast improvement on this character in comparison to my last, I am still not entirely pleased with my skills, mainly drawing and texturing, and would have liked to improve more in the past year, however I am seeing progress so that is re-assuring. Overall I think I did well to achieve what I did in the timeframe considering I had to learn new programs and workflows.