W7: The Blizzard Character Brief

Working in the style World of Warcraft, concept, model, and texture an NPC or creature that you could imagine roaming the plains of Durotar, exploring the depths of Deepholm, or just sitting in the Pig and Whistle Tavern knocking back a mug o' Thistle Tea.

Character/Creature Requirements

• Must be wearing some kind of clothing or armour

• Can add weapons or accessories

• 6,000 poly budget with 1 x 1024 tga texture budget for the finished character.

Intended Learning Goals

• At the successful conclusion of this project you will have;

• Worked to a stylised concept.

• Collected, collated, analysed and annotated photographic reference for usage.

• Experimented with various colour palettes.

• Demonstrated efficient modelling and texturing.

• Demonstrated Diffuse only texturing with implied lighting for definition.

• Demonstrated game-readiness by rendering your character in a real-time lighting environment

Submission Requirements and Specification

• Complete an individual Game Production Asset Template for each model you build. This must

• Include self-assessment, and 4 ways in which your work could be improved.

• Meshes should be completed using under 6000 triangles

• The model should be textured using 1 x 1024 24bit (or 1x32bit) Targa.

• Unit scale should be set to centimetres.

• The mesh to not have any errors.

• Modifier stack will be collapsed.

• Final images with and without wireframes.

• Submitted files will be highly organised, presented and named professionally.

STRETCH GOAL: Character to be rigged and posed in blog embedded 3D viewer.

First and foremost, I wanted to see what WOW concepts and 3D models look like. They've recently updated there model textures and quality with their upcoming Legion expansion pack, and I wanted to make sure my character would be applicable. Wow has quite a saturated, a curly stylised feel to it which I wanted to make sure I replicated.

Looking at some of the environment examples from the brief, I wanted to look at the colour schemes, and climates they have in the game. I wanted my character to be able to fit in an environment, but contrast with it as well so they don't just melt into the background.

Originally my character was going to be a Necromancer, but I decided that idea might be a bit generic. To evolve that idea, I decided to do an Undead Queen. Via name generator I've decided to call her Lady Morena Hartwell. Though may have been "normal" once, she's been corrupted and turned into a demon like creature and is now a self-appointed Queen. As there is already a Queen of the Forsaken (Lady Sylvanas Windrunner), I've decided to make her a rival.

Onto my moodboard I collected images of skull masks, claws, gothic fashion, draping materials, skeleton inspired clothing, demonic women, queen examples, and an existing Wow character. I used a mix of these to create a strong concept for my character, these were great ref when I was designing.

To get the general feel of the character out of my head I did a quick sketch showing how I wanted the form to flow, I also wanted one of her eyes to be nestled in a horn growing out of her face. Using the mask method I used in my last project, I knocked out 4 designs and then decided on the strongest one. In this case it was the 3rd silhouette; she exhumes an effortless power which I quite like. Also her top heavy figure makes her look strong and pretty badass.

I then used the pieces of the other silhouettes to level up my chosen one. The flipped sleeve ends flows back round to her hand, giving and nicely flowing teardrop shape, the cape also looks like a rising sun, or a creatures eye.

Following that, I did my linework over the blockout, making sure to capture her evil essence.

After finishing my linework I did a value blockout with the new details, and have started to do values on the character. A helpful method is to section of the parts so I can select and change their values easily. I’m aware that this is a 3D project as well and don’t want to spend too much time concepting and lose out on modelling and development time later on.

The design is quite detailed and I found that my values were getting a bit messy so after some peer feedback I decided to make the values flat again and sort out them out (I was getting ahead of myself). This greatly helped and I got my values and details completed.

Process: Initial silhouettes through to final values (I was surprised how fast I was getting through them compared to before). I did end up lightening the shoulder pauldrons however because they were being lost in the cape.

For colours I kept it simple at first, I got a colour wheel and did a wash of each base colour. This meant I could get an overall feel of the scheme before over-complicating thing ; I could then add in accents, complementary colours and variation later. I decided to go for the dark lilac colour as it went with this character best.

Following that I started adding more colour, however part way through I had a talk with a guest tutor (an artist who comes in and helps us with our work). They helped me a lot with how I could improve on with the colour schemes and what would work well. They also helped me with parts of the design that I didn't notice such as the horned-eye being too high, the highlights needing to be sharper and glowing eye needing to have more bounce light. We also spoke about how to balance the cool and warm in her outfit and that the colours I used needed to run through the whole character for a kind of continuity.

Final character concept with imposing shadow and dark background for a foreboding effect. I especially like how she practically glows on the dark grey background.

I then moved on to modelling, which I've learnt how to do a lot better since the Aviator project. During this time I got some feedback on how to improve my model and concepts from a tutor and a peer. They said to make character look more believable by exposing the gums and jawline, and pointed out that the sharp teeth stop a bit abruptly.

With the concept my tutor said that the torso looked a bit too busy and should perhaps be a it more dark blue, to remedy that I did a simple paintover and increased the glow of the gem which was previously being a bit lost.

These are the more recent shots of my model; I've finished the head for now and am working on the rest of the outfit. I'm getting a bit close to my budget though so I will cut down where need be, like the eye for instance.

Most recent shot of model, I'm currently working on the top and chest centre details.

I've had quite a busy week but I'm working faster than before and am happy with my progress. Next week will be finishing my model, unwrapping and packaging it, and then sculpting it. I'm also having fun on this project so that always good. :)