Armoured Character project - HAND IN -

Joseph Shaw
P13202443
P13202443@myemail.dmu.ac.uk
Project Title: Armoured Character

For this project we were given a very open brief of having to design an armoured hero character for future IP development. The character could exist in any kind of genre/universe, however the only constraint was that the character be realistic.

Because the brief was so open to interpretation I needed some kind of a starting point. I decided very early on to narrow down exactly what I was going to do, and chose to pursue a concept that was more specific but true to the brief. I went with the idea of designing a female armoured character that had to exist in a sci-fi universe. When I started to collect reference I looked at a lot of existing IP's with the same idea for inspiration, such as Metroid, Halo and FemShep from Mass Effect.

With an idea narrowed down, I began creating quick silhouette concepts, followed by some slightly more refined value sketches. I imagined a character with several sets of armour, from light to heavy, I wanted to create a character that had a slim lower-profile suit and and much heavier bulkier armour. As I was sketching the characters one of my key goals was to have the character be obviously female, while also being fully armoured head to toe. For this reason, body language and posture was important in conveying the sex of the character.

Once I had spent some time creating the thumbs I decided to try and work up some more refined concepts in line and colour. I worked indirectly from the thumbs I had created, however I realized at this point I was having some issues. A lot of what made the initial thumbnails successful in the first place was lost when creating these more refined concepts. No amount of polish or rendering was going to help, so I decided to step back and analyse what was holding me back from pulling off a successfully more refined concept. I tried various other approaches such as going directly into painting over the top of the thumbnail, however this also resulted in something that looked very uncertain. I decided that I needed to work up from the thumbnails more directly.

When creating the final concepts, I enlarged the thumbnails I had chosen and worked them up directly from that, using the thumbnail as a basis for creating tight line work. Doing this helped me retain the successful elements of the thumbnail, and resulted in some much better concepts than the earlier iterations. Something else that also challenged me when creating this character was the fact that I was creating more hard-surface oriented armour designs . Hard surface is something I struggle with as I am very accustomed to drawing fantasy oriented characters with more organic shapes. It helped to use tight line work over the thumbnail in order to create solid looking armour.

To conclude, despite having some issues in trying to create solid looking designs midway through the project I am fairly pleased with how my final designs turned out. I wanted a female character with practical full body armour, that looked sci fi and slightly exaggerated while still remaining somewhat feasible, and I think I came pretty close to attaining just that. In pertaining to realism, the main things I thought about were ensuring that the characters proportion and anatomy weren't overly stylized, and also looking at the practicality of the armour, making sure that it could articulate and that the character would have a convenient range of motion while also being protected. Given more time I would have liked to push these designs further and explored the thumbnails more, I would also have liked to go into more detail with the armour, giving more indicators of material definition and decals to represent and allegiance/faction that the character can be associated with. Similar to the previous project, what I took away most from this project was design, being able to analyse a concept and evaluate what does or doesn't work and why. Going through a few frustrations of not being able to create a successful concept forced me to step back and evaluate what it was in particular that wasn't working, which in turn aided me towards more successful designs.