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[Jayme Chouinard]

Its an 8-week course that looks at my standard approach to designing characters. We'll be looking at this character and cover the full spectrum of the design process including research and initial ideas, idea refinement, right through to finalised concepts that can be used in production. Weekly tasks have been created so that you can create your character and include it in your portfolio. I've put quite a lot of work in to the materials for this course so, if you're interested, head over to the CGMA site to sign up :)

For gathering references, I usually go to Pinterest first. I like to gather references for every aspect of the character including outfits and accessories, personality, and some figure model references. My personal taste as an artist is inspired by Castlevania, The Matrix, Vampire: The Masquerade, Magic: The Gathering, H.R. Giger, and The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, so that influences how I mold the reference into my own designs.

Sindriira is arrogant, capable, confrontational, and shrewd. Conveying this personality through the proportions in her face was the main challenge of this week. I explored the narrow, angular features found in a lot of Elven characters as well as large or piercing eye shapes. Features like the drawn up eyebrows, pursed lips, and swept-back hairstyle were also important to convey nobility and conscension. Doing a turnaround of the final portrait helps me figure out the form in 3D space.

I wanted this character to look powerful and in control through her body language. The camera is at a low angle looking up at Sindriira to make her look strong. She uses her magic to levitate while bringing her whip chain around to attack in a twisting fashion. Making the character pose dynamic was a process in this class. I started with small thumbnails focusing on the gesture or energy of the pose. The figure should have contrasting angles and twists to make the pose interesting. Over the next few weeks, I redrew so many aspects of the character to bring the energy of the thumbnail into the final piece. Posing is definitely something that I could improve on and is essential to communicating what a character is about.

The shoulder armor was really tough for me to draw in perspective accurately. After a few unsuccessful attempts, I used Blender to 3D model the main forms in perspective. Blender is a free 3D modeling and animation program with plenty of online tutorials on YouTube. I spent an afternoon learning the basic hotkeys and making this model, taking a screenshot, and drawing on top of it back in Photoshop. Modeling software can be helpful for drawing hard surface materials in perspective.

Rendering is about lots of time. The more time spent rendering, the better the render. Accurate anatomical details are an important part of reaching a final, polished render. I always have better luck with rendering hands and other specific anatomical details of a pose when I take my own reference photos.

For this project, we built up the forms in grayscale first before applying color. The benefit of painting this way is that it is easier to see lighting and form without the distraction of color palette. In order to give me a jump start on transitioning to the color version, I used Gradient Maps in Photoshop. Gradient Maps are an adjustment layer where one can specify a color to replace a value. The example above shows how a first pass on the skin looks with a gradient map. This is only a first step and there was a lot of painting on top of this to get the final look of the color painting.

One last technique I used was photobashing. This is a technique where an artist places stock photography or photo textures in the image as a means to save time or to get a sense of realism. The trick is getting the photo to blend in with the hand-painted parts. This involves making sure that the overall color and lighting matches as well as making sure the level of detail is consistent between the photo and hand-painted areas. One trick is to use a Surface Blur to reduce the noise or grain in a photo to help it blend.

I always imagined this scene as some sort of vampire ritual. The heroine is raising her magical chalice in a toasting gesture while levitating above human livestock, draining these tortured souls of their life force. The chalice in her hand is her magical artifact. Clerics need to hold or display their magical artifacts as a way to use their powers in D&D lore. The chalice was chosen as a symbol of vampires drinking blood like royalty would drink wine. The whip chain, her weapon of choice, lacerates her enemies. The more blood she consumes as a vampire, the stronger she gets. Her crown, a large cloth hairpin-like two batwings, keeps her hair back out of her face. As her subjugates become weak, their remains become part of the boney spires that dot this landscape.

Here Pete Zoppi - CGMA instructor for our Character Castingand Character Creation for Films/Cinematics courses and a senior characterartist with a wealth of film and video game industry experience - offers someinsight into character creation and model optimization.

Adding detail for me comes downto where and what the model is used for. For example, when doing a filmor cinematic character many of the medium sized details would need to bemodeled into the mesh. This could mean panel cut lines, insets for rivetsor bolts etc. If this same model was being used as a source mesh tobake into a game mesh, many of these details could be done in a texturepainting application or by using floating geometry.

Game rendering obviously bringswith it an additional set of considerations, in terms of the need to considerthe graphical processing limitations of the various platforms. Are there anyhard and fast rules for optimizing character models for real-time rendering?

This assignment was to design a Medieval Crusader. I decided to create my character, the Pumpkin Knight, who is a jovial and lovable glutton. Perhaps once he was a proud warrior, but now he is more likely to be found at a feast than in a fight. His jolly nature is reflected by his rotund figure and his round and soft shape language.

This assignment was to create a character line up of three pirates in order to create a diverse cast of unique characters. I set out to tell a story in my designs by having all three characters interact with each other. The story revolves around the capture of an old man who is in chains. I call him The Prisoner. He is proud and defiant of his captors, noted by his upright posture with his chest thrust out and his shoulders back, while glaring fiercely down at his foe. Despite his chains and his tattered clothing, he carries himself with dignity and strength as if he may yet again gain the upper hand. The long and elegant lines in The Prisoners body and legs evoke a rangy grace to his physique but this smoothness is punctuated by the sharp triangular shapes in his wild hair and beard, which speak of the resilience of his frosty demeanor.

In this assignment we were tasked with creating a character design for a dragon in the style of two iconic artists: Ronald Searle and Jay Ward. I chose to draw a dragon who is relaxing while drinking a poison green cocktail and smoking a cigarette in his fashionable cigarette holder. The dragon is mellow and fairly contented with nothing to do but enjoy himself in a smoky dragon bar.

In the pose where he is in the branches of the tree, he is silently spying on our hero while plotting his ambush. I wanted to taper his pose and use a clear line of action to show the moment of anticipation before a strikes. His silhouette is smooth and streamlined to show the direction of his attention and draw the eye off camera where he is looking.

Info:

The objective of this class is to understand character creation for film and game cinematics in terms of a characters profile, and its ultimate purpose in a composition or narrative. Each week we will focus on a different aspect of character construction and explore the technical ways of assembling a final character.

The first thing I did was look for references to Brad Pitt's age in the movie "Fury", so any image that depicted him in a period from 2013 to 2016 was fine. Then of course the main references on which I fully relied are those found in the premieres of the film; I also created a sort of 360 by aligning and rotating the images taken with the same camera and with the same focal length to have a better prespective of his head deformations watching it from different angulations and also I've found some life cast head references.

Initially I sculpted the likeness starting from a sphere with dynamesh in zbrush having my references always on the side, then later, through the Zwrap Plugin I transferred the topology of the Vface of XYZ texture on my sculpture. Since then, I started sculpting my tertiary details such as scars or bigger wrinkles in HD GEOMETRY to have a better quality on details and faster displacement map export. To match the likeness quite often i was trying to match side and front reference with my sculpt using zbrush spotlight tool.

I started with a general blockout of the shape and composition of the clothes on Marvelous, then moved on to maya where I created a clean and suitable topology and then to zbrush where I put the finishing touches on the shapes and details. I modeled the boots on maya, added the details on zbrush, same thing for the gun and the jacket zip.

And here comes perhaps the most difficult moment of the project together with the likeness: the hair. To understand the functioning and the realization of the side shading I spent days watching videos on youtube to understand the length of the various sizes of the hair cutting machine to make this type of shading on the sides.

I have to say that as regards the texture creation process using a Vface it is really very artistic friendly; I just had to tweak something here and there in photoshop, a slight color correction on the albedo map, and a desaturation of the red channel to have a very good effect already; same thing with the displacement map, I eliminated some deformation that didn't go well with Brad's face in the secondary shapes of the map and adding the details sculpted in hd geometry the graphic rendering is formidable, I've also painted a roughness\specular map in zbrush. The clothes have been texturized in Substance over a High poly version of the clothes. Furthermore, as you can understand, I tried to make the clothes very realistic, and considering that the protagonist of the film lives in a tank this must have been very dirty and so were his clothes. Even the dirt on the face was developed on Substance by bringing together multiple procedural maps.

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