Character: Silhouettes and Character

For todays lesson we were taught about the use of silhouettes in character design and we were all given a separate type of character to work with, the one I was given was "pirates." At first I thought of the typical pirate with long swords and captain hats, but then I thought more about space pirates and Alien like characters, much like Treasure Planet. These were the silhouettes that I had came up with. I tried to sketch some villains, heroes and sidekicks just using silhouettes.

Narrative: First Character Designs

 

After researching and using my influence maps I have done some quick character designs. I was looking for a crazy hyena and in contrast an old slow porcupine.

I was thinking for design the hyena will be more triangular and the porcupine circular and using his spikes for an old hair style maybe?

Narrative: First Storyboard Ideas

Narrative: Style and Character Developement

We have been discussing our art direction for our animation and we have decided to look at art works from Africa as this is the location of our safari. Following from this we will see how this will effect our style decisions when designing our environments, I think we want to incorporate similar designs from African art for our environments but incorporating our own designs for characters and mixing the two together. 

When looking at these influence maps, the characters and cave art work seem to use simple shapes for their designs and I want to use this when designing our own characters. Also in the paintings they are mostly abstract work and suggestive painterly strokes for their environments which would be inspirational when designing the environments for our animated short. 

After discussing with Alan we have decided to look into the personality of our characters before designing to help us to understand our own characters. 

The Porcupine: 
- Old character
- Easily distracted
- Has no idea what is going on around him, in his own little world.
- Slow
- No drive

The Hyena:
- Crazy
- Energentic
- Clumsy
- Adventurous
- Clever but not clever at the same time. 

Here is an influence map when looking at personality and characters and how an old character would look like and the opposite a crazy character in contrast. 

 
 From all these influence maps that I have gathered I am going to take these and start to create some character and environment designs, whilst carrying on with story boarding for our narrative.

Maya Lip Syncing: Eyes, Eyebrows & Toungue

Mental Ray Lighting Techniques - Linear Work Flow

Today we were assigned to start to understand the making of a linear and more realistic render which is commonly used within special effects, but also to improve the quality of our animations when it comes to it. I had learnt how to apply a gamma correction node and to work in 32 bit rather than 8 bit.

This is the process that is involved. 

Original Image - Non Linear

 



Gamma Corrected

Final Gathering



Raw Image

Final EXR Render

Character: Character Design Briefing and Initial Ideas

 

On the briefing I was given three deferent words to use for either my environment, mechanism and character, we could use them however we want to come up with our ideas.

 

Oceanic (submerged, Depth)

Light (visibility, Darkness)

 

Collective (Crowded, Cluttered)

After getting these three words my initial thought was to have the light and darkness as a key concept to my game, similar to limbo and Allen Wake where he uses light to dispel the darkness away (Evil silhouetted characters). With this key concept being done before on console I thought of using similar mechanics but for a different audience, that being the every day user on their phone or tablet. 

In this assignment we were tasked to come up with a game design with 2 characters minimum and environment designs to go along side it, this will be in the format of a kick starter campaign. 



Idea 1

-Tablet Game. Your character has an ability to change from a light and dark character. Each character can see different things within the world, the light character can see the world for what it is but you use the dark side of your character (almost like a shadow state) to reveal what has died or been there before. You can use the dark side of you to pass through walls and unlock secret rooms. This game would be about collecting artifacts under water where you go searching shipwrecks to find artifacts that you are collecting for points within the game, you can use these points to upgrade your character or unlock special abilities.

Idea 2

- Another idea was a sandbox game on console. You create your character in the fantasy world Atlantis inspired, and you have to go around collecting objects and materials to rebuild your home town and then to develop into bigger things, the only problem is when the darkness appears the buildings are lost and you have to rebuild what was lost to the darkness, but you can build defenses to protect yourself.

Idea 3

- This is idea is a table top game. Collecting miniatures where both armies are oceanic based from different dimensions in the underwater world. You can either side with the dark side or the light side in which your army will fight for, each of the armies have different abilities.

Idea 4

- This will be a tablet game. Your character is stuck underwater in a shipwreck or in a mystical reef platform. You have little light in this game, so it would be very atmospheric as you use your light to see the path and get out away from being submerged before you run out of oxygen under the water.
- Idea of trying to reach the top surface in time
-Mechanics uses similar to flappy bird.

Idea 5

- Tablet based game.
- A platform based game that has similar mechanics to doodle jump.
- Jumping up the platforms before the darkness get you?

Idea 6

- Tablet based game.
- You choose your type of character (Oceanic monster design), and you have to go out and collect your family of similar characters to your own before the timer runs out and bring them back to your home base.
- Main Mechanic being light being a safe zone and darkness being unsafe and dangerous.

Idea 7

- Tablet Based game.
- Using silhouettes on painted backgrounds of oceanic scenes.
- Under sea monster designs as the bad guys.
- The idea of the game is to get through the level undetected by the monsters that lurk in the shadows. You are a character that is an underwater archeologist and goes in search for the lost gem of the southern seas (I'll think of something better later on) from an underwater world.
- This is a stealth based game that you use your silhouette cloak to form shapes so the monsters wont detect you as, eg. Plants, rocks, fish. and you use this mechanic to get through the levels to progress further.
- The creatures will have lights on them to detect you with and it will warn you whether you have been detected or not.

Visual examples: