Dichotomy Post-Mortem

   After having  week away from this project, I thought it would be a good idea to go back and reflect on how I think it went, what went well and what I'd improve etc. I think this was an excellent project to be honest, stressful; but enjoyable.

   As always, my favourite part of the project was the beginning. I love the research and idea development part of a project and this one was no exception. The aim of this project was to create two characters that were complete opposites, but would exist in the same universe. I started by mapping some brief ideas and looking at general character relationships and thinking about which ones inspired me enough to take further. With a few ideas in mind, I went onto Pinterest and compiled my findings into a large mood board to help me out.

My favourite of all the ideas I was thinking of was a brother / sister duo. Various sections of my research inspired a story for my characters and I came up with the idea that the characters were a brother and sister who had gone hiking with their parents and gotten lost from them. I really wanted to make them obviously different from one another, but establish a clear and strong bond between them. They were to be extremely different in appearance and personality. He was to be tall, gangly and made of sharp angles, whilst she was to be small and made of rounder shapes. He was also to adopt the character of the moody teen, whilst she is cute, sweet and ever so slightly irritating.
   I made a bash kit, which was helpful because it helped me visualise more the kind of shapes that would be used to make up the duo. I used these to make some sketches of my characters  to see how they fit together, always trying to make sure their designs complimented one another.

   I was pretty secure with my idea, so I looked further into the designs, trying to make them both contrast as much as possible. I focused on making everything about the girl's appearance small and rounded, whereas I wanted the boy to contrast by giving every part of him very angular edges. I then experimented with the boy's face and hair style. I decided I quite liked how he looked with long hair with one shaved side, so that he'd have more of an alternative look.

    I thought it important that I make sure both characters have a strong silhouette, so I worked on this next. I did some value paints next to them to find a design I liked, all the while experimenting with hair and costume.

   After this I experimented with some different values, so I could see which designs contrasted well with one another. I'd had a presentation and I'd been advised to make the girl's  hair contrast more with her shawl, and make her neck longer so that her silhouette is better.

   I then focused on adding more detail to my characters texture-wise. Even now after re submission though, I think I could have made the textures more interesting. It makes me a bit sad to look back at these concepts because even now I'm still really proud of them, I'm just dissapointed that I was unable to translate the idea into 3D effectively.

   After focusing on the colours, I drew both characters in a T pose so I'd be able to model from them.

   This was the little girl by the end. She's not AWFUL, but she could do with re-working. I only resubmitted the boy, because he has the more immediate problems. I'd like to come back to this model and perfect this on too, because frankly, it's a creepy model. If you look at her face on the side pose, she looks like a creepy doll. So if I come back to this, like I have been saying I would since we initially finished this project, my first port of call would be to sort out her face and round her features to it more. I would also improve the models topology and make her had more similar to the concepts.

   Modelling the boy has been a steep learning curve, but I have learnt a hell of a lot from doing this project. This is what the model looked like initially. I know. It makes me cringe looking at it. I can't believe I ever looked at it and thought 'Yeah this is going well.' He was way too feminine in appearance for words, and had the same unsettling doll appearance as his sister.

   I tried to refine this further to a point that I was happier with. At the time I thought it was a massive improvement, and I suppose it still is. I just can't look at the topology without cringing, although the face was much better. In my formative assessment meeting we discussed how it was still feminine in appearance, so I took it away and concepted some more.

   My main points of crit were to improve his topology, give him more defined textures, and give him a more broad chin to make him look more male. I did some concepts to start off with, because I wanted to know what I was aiming for. I decided that I wanted to change him, so I looked at disney 3d models like Tadashi from Big Hero 6. I was making him slightly older, but it was okay because having an aged point of reference helped me draw out his whole stance and stature to a more concrete reference.

   I decided that until I have mastered faces properly and can translate it to a model well, I would change the hairstyle to a short, more masculine style, rather than the alternative style hair. 

    After deciding to keep the same colours and essentially the same outfit, I thought that I might give him a hat instead of just hair, to make his head more interesting.

   This was the finished result by the time I had finished modelling, re unwrapping and texturing.I think pretty much every aspect of the character is a massive improvement and now he definitely looks male. He's less stylized but is modeled more effectively. I'm going to work harder on stylisation, because it's really enjoyable and I think I could be really good at it if I pushed myself. I've given him better hands and his shoes are leaps and bounds better than what they were.

   I think this project has taught me a lot over the course the original project and the re submission, and I think it's so comforting to see how far I've come. I enjoyed this project so much and I potentially might think of just redoing it completely for fun, as a personal project. I'm immensely proud of this achievement.