Character Dichotomy - Week 3

   The end of last week and the beginning of this one have been a bad stretch for me, I've been pretty ill. Nothing serious, just a really hefty cough. The main problem is, when I feel ill, I find it hard to get myself motivated, I don't know if its just me, but that's what happens. So this weeks been pretty slow. As I write this now, I still don't feel myself, but hey, I need to push on. Last week I made silhouettes and colour pallets for both my frog and insect character, and then iterated on the frog design to give me a final design to model.
   Despite the lack of motivation I've still managed to finish my model, further develop my second character, which has now changed by the way, but more on that later. Make orthographic's for the second character and think more about the colours of my main character. Among other things.
   Like I said the week started off pretty slow, so my mind went to something relatively simple and stress free. Modeling. My design was relatively easy to model, apart from the face. I used reference and it turned out ok, but due to the face being on the body, rather than an extension of it, I made my character look weird and unrealistic. It is a giant frog that walks on two legs, but it still should retain realistic aspects for it to be believable. And at this point I wasn't sure if it was up to scratch. With the project due in next week I didn't feel there was enough time to make such a large change to it, and as I hadn't done the texturing at this point I was hoping that it would look better after that.

Character 1 design geometry.

   You may have noticed that this differs from my original design in what hes wearing. This is because when I had finished making his body, the design looked too bare. So went back to the drawing board to spruce him up a bit. I added a large trench coat with buckles, a bowler hat, leg knife and an ankle gun. All these add ons fit with the theme of a bounty hunter.

   Before going any further with this character, I needed to work on my second one. Originally the plan was to give him a partner, and the partner was to be an insect. After playing about with that idea for ages and getting nowhere, I thought maybe I could make his partner a frog, like him. So I mashed up some side by side shapes to see what worked well. And rolled with it.

Character pair silhouette exploration.

   The top right one worked the best in my opinion. A small creepy character accompanied by a large muscly one has been used quite a bit, and works well, so that's the pair I went with.

   As I already had existing designs of frog silhouettes I looked back to them to see if I could use them, the first silhouette I did stood out to me, but it lacked the bulk I was after. Working from this silhouette I made more.

Second Character ideas.

   My favorite was number 6, he looked muscular yet funny, and the body shape made him top heavy, which gave him a slightly unrealistic feel. But he wasn't bulky enough, His comedic value caused him to not sit right with his counterpart, so he had to be scrapped. My second choice, the one I went with, number 3 had the bulk, and because of this, and his loose fitting tank top vest, he looked like a steroid meat head. 

   The pair together look like this.

Dichotomous character pair. 

Second character orthographic's.

   Going back to the main character of the two, more specifically his colour. I have already done some colour pallets for frogs, bu now I needed to see what my design would look like in those specific colours. To do this I used the silhouette and painted over it, doing this took little time as it was just the silhouette. I started by just adding block colours, and then moved onto mixing them and adding patterns and shaped to each one. 

Block colours

Mixed colours and patterns.

   Among all what I've just talked about I also unwrapped my mesh and started to texture. But i'll go into more detail next week on that. Only a few days to go until the deadline.