Yr3 Week 4: Style Matrix - Aviator Character

For the next brief in the style matrix, I have chosen to create a character. I want this character to be related to my third project where I will make an environment in the same style, so I looked through the briefs for a character and an environment that I thought I could link together quite well. After some consideration I chose the Aviator character brief, and the "home in the sky" environment. I decided that I will be creating the character first as a break between environment projects and as I also think it will be a bit of a smaller project and allow me to practice substance painter and PBR a little bit more which will help to speed up the final environment.

The brief came with two pre-designed concepts. After discussing with tutors, the briefs specify that you can use your own artistic interpretation for these concepts; meaning I can change them and stylise them if I see fit, or I can model them straight from the concept. As I was specifically aiming for something quite stylised, I chose to modify the existing concept to match my style which you can see further down in this post.

I started off by gathering some general photographs and images of aviators and steampunk inspired clothing to give me more of an idea how this theme has been represented by different people and perhaps things that I could modify on my design.

Once I had collected enough aviator specific imagery I decided to create a seperate moodboard for the intended style. I decided I wanted to go for hand-painted PBR; much like they use in Overwatch. This is a relatively new style without a ton of examples, so I am quite excited to try it out for myself and see what results I am able to produce.

I took the original concept provided in the brief by DMU Game Art, and decided to modify it to resemble the style I ended to make my character in. Following Overwatch's proportions and stretching the original character out to match is, and then photobashing on top of the design.

Once I had found a design which I was pleased with, I did a few experiments into values and colour, but decided to keep very close to the original concept's colour scheme so that the character would still be readable as being the same.

I wanted to create my own concept for the character; as I felt slightly uncomfortable using a modified version of someone else's concept without actually sketching it out myself, so did a very rough pin-up style posed sketch of the character.

Once I was happy with the basic design I created some orthographic views of the character to aid me in ensuring the character followed the correct proportions as intended.

Next will I plan to model the character fully ready for unwrapping in the final week.