As my FMP is split into 3 characters, I will be splitting them up into 5 weeek segments and doing each character within that timeframe. The first charcter I will be modelling is the Overwatch character.
I decided in the planning stage of my FMP that I would concept this character myself. While it can sometimes add on more work than is needed becasue I am speciallising as a 3D character artist, I am an avid player of Overwatch and felt that I could accurately represent the themes that run in all of the characters within the game, and key shape language as well.
After lots and lots and lots of research and reference gathering, I began working on my concepts in early October. I allowed myself plenty of time before the start date of my FMP (January) because I wanted plenty of time to take a moment to step back from my concepts and then return with fresh eyes and fix anything I saw.
My concepting process started as such:
It's important to note that the entire concepting phase right up until my final render was done in my own art style, as I was mainly focusing on getting the shape language of the character down before immitating the art style of the concept artists at Blizzard.
After this initial sketch phase I very much liked a clean look for the legs of the character similar to characters like Sombra and Tracer, but also liked the idea of some kind of object or light trailing behind the character also similar to Tracer's blue light streak when blinking or the animation of Sombra's hack.
I then went in to push the values of the character more and work on some more details, and settled on the right concept with some adjustments to the size of the character's plaits and the values. As I'm looking at the concept now, I realise in retrospect just how strong all of the values are in these concepts, but when I was first told by my tutor I hardly noticed. Note to self: check values against reference more frequently!
After realising my value issue, I then went in to work on wehre I wanted the focus to be, and I was also curious as to whether the character's plaits were cluttering the silhouette of the character too much, so I tried her with the short hairstyle in two of these concepts as well.
As usual with concepting, I settled on an amalgamation of all of these concepts, deciding to tone down the contrast on her legs all together as that is not where I wanted to focus to be, though I did like the high contrast around her chest and face with the white hair as that is where I want the viewer's eye to go straight away.
Its also important for me to point out that around this point I decided to make the character Nordic in appearance, having liked the bright blonde/white hair from the beginning of my concepts, the blue eyes that I gave her in the following colour studies finalised that she was most definitely going to be from a northern European country. And for concepting's sake, I decided to make her Finnish, even sneaking in the Finnish flag on her leg with the blue cross against the grey background.
Then came colour studies! Ah, colour studies. I'm not sure why but it often feels to me like colour studies take me forever to complete due to how much trial and error goes into the process. I knew as I was initally drafting up this character that I wanted her to use Symmettra's 'photon technology' which is a bright blue technology that forms objects out of light (Blizzard's answer to having a wizard in a sci-fi world). So with this in mind, I went about creating an outfit that both complimented the blue of her abilities and primary fire, whilst not allowing it to become one big homogenous blue blob.
Settling on the bottom middle two characters along with the one on the top right, I tired to work with the colour wheel and see what was the opoosite on the colour wheel was to this blue. Much to my dismay, once I put the colours down on the bottom middle character, I realised that while the yellow of the legs do pop, not only was it a little too bright, but very similar to the colours of Tracer, almost too similar.
So finally, it was decided, the bottom middle-left character was the final character, with some minor adjustments to the value.
As my final piece of artwork in my own style before the final render, I created this portrait of the character, but ended up unfortunately scrapping it for a close up of the full body render that I did, similar to a Sombra concept I was referencing at the time.
But I like it anyway, so it can go here!
And last but certainly not least, the final render! Finally adapting the overwatch art style for the dynamic pose the character is in and her body proportions, this is where I really felt the concept started to come together and that I could see the character in Overwatch!
Along with the gun I rendered to make the character more believable, I finished up this render with a few more tweaks to the colours and value before it was done.
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