Initial idea sketch
This is one idea, its a rough sketch i did this using a graphic tablet, inspired by the villain vor from warframe.
I used a lot of featured that was inspired from warframe such as the characters vor facial features.
I used his accessories like helmet and robotic eye for my fianl peice. One thing I thing that good for this sketch is that the sketch looks very villainies that was what type of look I was going after. My idea is too used the same villianas look from this sketch for my final piece and use features such as the robotic eye, although I don’t want to have that evil eccentric look. I think using the graphic tablet is good practice too use more tools and it help me to become more versatile and give me more option for art work. I could use with multiple thing such sketching and colouring and rendering in Photoshop.
This is my experimentation with Mudbox; I firstly modelled the head, hair and the features such as the eyes, nose and mouth. Then I used the stencil projection tool and took an image of a 'navi from the movie avatar to colour and add skin tone. This experiment went well because I think that the facial features and skull is anatomically correct. I think I could make it more life like by adding more detail to the skin and using a skin tone that I will edit and work on. This experiment was to help me practice and get the general idea of the process to create my final piece , I had to model the head add the key featured then the smaller details and render it. These are the general steps for my final sculpt i have to do these steps just on a higher level but I feel its good practice to see what the results are when I do this.
character back story
Ryza was a child who once lived with a happy loving family of four, a mother, Father and a brother. Even though he had a family, he would have strange visions of a woman who he would say it was his other ‘mother’ who lived on a small island. He also remembers that he fell through a hole In the ground and dug himself out when he was five years old but he was only four when he had those visions.
When he was seven his family had a tragic accident where they died, engulfed by the ocean while on a cruise, he was found starving on the street and was taken in by the orphanage 'West No Returns Orphanage'. The other children and even the carers abused him. The only person who he can trust and can consider a friend was the orphanage tutor and professor Gustavo Martinez who was also an organic robotics scientist and engineer.
They would spend hours together creating and engineering prototypes for exoskeletons, ryzas work with the professor was recognized by many universities and when he was 17 he was known as a protégée, the Mozart of robotics.
Even though he was top of his class, he hated academia, he thought the university restricted him from doing what he truly wanted to do which was military exoskeletons. One day he finished his personal project of the world's first portable exoskeleton, when he showcased it disaster struck... he blew up the school killing one student. He was expelled from his university. Having nothing to do he started to have even stronger visions of his other ‘mother’, he decided to track her down. Then found the small island he envisioned the woman was on, (coltzward island) he went there searching for the woman asking the very few people who lived there if there was a woman who matched the description of the one in his visions. As he was about to give up, he saw an old woman struggling to carry hay on a farm, he asked her if she needed help, she accepted and invited him into her house. As he entered he felt an overwhelming sensation of happiness almost as if he felt at home. The old woman asked where he was from, he replied he doesn’t have anywhere called home. She felt sympathetic towards Ryza and invited him to stay until he found a place of his own, he accepted. As he lived with the woman doing farm work and chores he never felt happier, after a couple of months he asked if she had a family, she said a son.
Ryza asked what happened to him, she said he ran away.
Suspicious of what happened to the son ryza investigated around the house, he found an old newspaper inside a chest reporting a woman who killed her son was still not found. The picture of the murderer was the exact woman he envisioned and realized it was the woman he was staying with and the boy in the pictures look exactly like he did when he was younger. He suddenly started having flashbacks, he realized he was the boy she murdered and she put him in that hole but he reincarnated still holding the memories of his past life. While reading the newspaper horrified of what he has learned. The old woman appeared behind holding a machete and attempted to kill him, chopping of his head with a machete. However his head was rolling on the floor, it was still talking and his body was still moving. Picking up his head, he took the machete of the woman and killed her.
After the incident He went mad, and went back to professor gustuvo holding his severed head and convinced him to help completely modify his body, making him the first immortal cyborg.
Unit 2 sculp villian
Intorduction to reasearch skill in Art and Design.
This is my second initial idea sketch, it's more of a anime/manga style sketch, I think it looks too heroic, but I do like some features such as the hairstyle. One thing about this sketch is that it's not very anatomically correct making me unable to make the final image to look much likes this anime character.
My idea for my final piece is to take the serious and stoic look from this design sketch, but also I wanted to contrast the first sketch in terms of age and wanted to have my final villain to be a younger character.
Although we are modeling only the head, I had a design sketch the top half of the body because I felt that it could help present the serious look of the character I also added character specific features like the cannon arm to relate to the back story and identify the character a bit more. I won't be using any of the body part but this sketch will help me envision the character as a whole better when it come to my final sketch
Mudbox Experiment
My third design sketch is a combination of the first two, it has the hairstyle of the second and the same anime look to it, while having the evil look and the robotic mask of first sketch, what I think went well was the mixture of the true idea sketches with the evil look from the first and the hairstyle and facial features from the second.
I tried to include a more anatomical aspect to it, including a strong jawbone and Masseter which is common for villains I also added robotic armor for the face and helmets, as this relates to the character, and what I want it to have for the final model, this idea sketch was inspired not only by my initial secondary research by also by sci fi anime such as gurren lagann and motropolis. think i could of added more anatomically correct features in order to help me envision what the final piece would look like more.
In this anatomical sketch of the skull, what I focused on was to get a correct and accurate imitation of the features, I focused on key features such as the zygomatic arch and the jawbone, also I think I could have improved the symmetry of the eyes and the spacing between the eye and the nose. I also could have improved on accurately the bottom teeth.
These sketches are to help me practice and to gain an undersatnding of what human forms look like, and where the facial features are placed on the face. this will help get my final sculpture anatomically correct. In this anatomical sketch I drew a skull is at an angle, I tried to see if I could still accurately record the features in this position.
Anatomical sketch
I focused on features such as the curve on the upper mouth area, also tried to show how the zygomatic arch starts from right under the eye and goes all the way next to your ear.I also tried to copy how the other main features on the face, i think i could of recorded the feature possitions better because the facial features are actually on the lower half of the face.
sculpt progression
second initial idea sketch
third design sketch
sculptirist Induction excersise
This is my first 3d model, it is the head of an Orc type monster I made up, the program I used to create this is Sculptiris. I was going for an Orc type monster that resembled human features but also had distinct featured of monster in similar fantasy genre's such as the hobbit and lord of the rings. We used the basic sculpting tools such as the grab tool to create the create the basic shapes and features of the head such as the nose, mouth, eyes and horns, the I used the sculpt tool to add in the extra details, such as the bumps and folds on the skin, I also used the inverted sculpt tool to add insertions also to give certain features depth and to enhance the 3d aspect, thing such as the mask and mouth. I used the smooth tool to smooth everything down to neaten the details and get the organic skin texture to it.
This model is progressing to be my final sculpt, By using the grab and sculpt tool, I have already added some of the key features such as the human facial features and character features such as part of the mask,
what I am to do next is to add the rest of the main features such as the hair and top of the helmet, and then to add the detail such as the folds and wrinkles in the skin and also and extra detail to bring out the bone structure. I think this is a good start to toward my final piece but there are a couple of thing I need to alter, like the space between eyes and the shape of the lips to make it more anatomically correct.
I think that the model will turn out well if I keep the anatomy of his face correct while I add in more of the fantasy sci fi apperall I want this sculpt to have.
right now the scuplt is too plane so I would now proceed to add detail and more features to relate to my character Ryza
I then added the other main features such as the hair and helmet I planned on adding in. I altered one of the eyes to give a robot eye for that cyborg look. I also added some of the wrinkle and skin details on the face and neck with the cut and sclupt tool and tried to make the mask around his face stand out more. On his helmet I gave these horns at the back of it giving this almost square helmet like a bicycle helmet but I think it did not work and will probably alter it to being more rounded.
Design sketches
I added even more detail to the face and helmet. I used the same tools but also with the amplify tool to do it, I also changed the style and shape of the helmet as I did not like the earlier version. At this point I have come close to finishing the modeling aspect of this piece and will soon start to go in into rendering and coloring the model
design idea research
Something I like about the Raiden character design is the robotic jaw line armour. These images are research on how the final sculpt might look like and a good reference to how I could model some of the features. I think that these characters can help with the cyborg robotic part of my model but I think i need to to record more primary research of the human face and anatomical features and especially more lifelike faces to improve my work and gain the level of realism I am aiming for. what i like about this photo is that it has the same idea i was going for, the same human and robot mixture of features while still quite realistic.
For my character I thought of using a sci-fi cyborg character look. Inspirations for my character are characters like vor from war frame and Raiden from the metal gear franchise. What I like about these characters is how their futuristic robotic parts blend in fluently with their human features and don’t completely cover the face. This will help me see what my cyborg sculpt will look like as we have to show the human features of our character. Features I want to imitate from Vor are like are the old diabolical skin details, like the folds and wrinkles around the eyes and the on the forehead. I also want my character to have a robotic eye just like Vor's to give that cyborg look.
I researched some more anatomical sketches by Andrew Loomis, as you can see my researched was on the muscles on the face; skull and neck and how they look when are contracted and stretched by different positions and angles. This also helps me have a grasp on perspective. In Andrew Loomis’s drawings, his sketches are showing how the look of different macular features changes with different position and when you are in a lower camera angle you can see that jaw bone especial where the chin area starts to connect to the neck and become more rounded, rather than sharper as if you look at it dead on. He also shows the muscular anatomy such as the Zygomaticus minor and major, the levator superiors and the masseter. This will help me grasp an understanding on the anatomy of the face and help make my model more realistic.
Secondary Anotomical Research
Mudbox Experiment 2
progression 2
finishing the modeling aspect of the sculpt I used the spray tool with a crisscross and small dot texture to give the details of paws in the skin and to enhance the realism of the character, I then used the amplify tool to enhance any details like the wrinkles under the eye and face, and finally I just used the move tool to correct ant mistake on the face and placing the features in place so they are anatomically correct. as I started to render the model, I started by choosing a purple grey-ish tone to give that evil half dead body look to go with the Halloween theme, then I painted the face, I used the blur tool to smoothen out the paint and then used the burn tool to darken any areas where light would not get to enhancing that evil feel to him. after I switched to the color black and painted the mask around the models jaw line, I then add some metallic light textures I found online to give it that metallic look, I then painted the helmet with a dark grey adding different colors and patterns around and on the sides to decorate it. I also used a blue/black color for the upper torso and other colors for the shoulder pads. more subtle details are the veins in the eye, and the robotic eye which I used the dry brush to add, i also added a dirt like texture around his helmet just to add more detail
Final Piece
this is my finished, a 3d model of my cyborg character ryza.
The researched I have done on cyborg characters from games and animations has influenced me and helped create the model due to the fact that these character show me what my model will look like. and also it helped include features to signify my character is a cyborg.
also primary and secondary research of anatomy has helped me in creating a model which has the correct anatomical features of a human and has given me an undestanding of the human form to get my model to a realistic level.
I have used a plethora of techniques I have learnt in the class such as how to use the sculpting tools like grab, sculpted and flatten tools in mudbox and sculpturist, and rendering tools like blur, burn, projection and brush tools in mudbox. I also think research in unit one and working with Photoshop has helped us in the coloring and rendering aspect of the sculpt.
I think that the sculpting aspect was successful because I was able to get to produce small, subtle and intricate details on the model, but I do think that I was unable to model the right type of hair because hair would be very thin and detailed using many polygons, causing my machine to crash. what I aimed for was a scary sci- fi/ Halloween villain, I think I was able to capture the serious and villainous look but I think I could have made it more Halloween themed enhancing the scariness of the model, I also wanted to have changed the story to suit this Halloween theme I was going for but I think the 3d model was done well with minor mistakes but ultimately I am happy with the finished product.