Dichotomous Character blog submission

This is a summary of all my work for this project.

Including the files I need to show for final submission.

I've used a lot of different programmes for this project, and so I will break down how I made each part of the character, and experimented with various programmes to get the best result possible in the time I was given to complete the project.

For context I will briefly explain my characters and why they work as a Dichotomy.

I went with two characters based off of the greek god and goddess of the underworld Hades and Persephone. However to make it more original (and to break away from the norm of mid twenties caucasian character), as I didn't want to simply copy existing designs, I made my characters asian and had one young and one old. On reflection I feel like I should have nailed down a set ethnicity for my characters from the start. In the end I made Persephone Japanese and Hades Chinese as I felt these ethnicites contrast a good amount, but are still obviously linked as oriental asian. I didn't want to nail down a direct influence for clothing or overall design however as I felt like that would have restricted me too much whilst concepting.

Anyway, I wanted to contrast Persephone's youth and innocence with Hades age and experience. However I wanted to go deeper than wisdom and innocence being my dichotomy, so I went with a contrast in character too. Persephone was raised in isolation and so long for freedom and interaction with the world, and being an only child she's also become accustomed to getting what she wants. Whereas Hades was forced into his role as a leader, he is wary of the world and so shys away from interaction with anyone other than his queen. In this sense then Persephone is the unofficial ruler, an extroverted and commanding queen, who is slowly being turned cold by her stay in the unworld.

Hades is the offical ruler but he is introverted and tends more towards neutral. His springtime queen is slowly warming up his icy heart.

So these are the moodboards I put together for the two characters:

And here is my development sheet for the two characters:

Here are my colour iterations:

As you can see it took less iteration to reach Hades colour scheme, mostly because I already had a colour scheme to contrast it with.

And here is my final concept:

It's still unfinished as can be clearly seen by the fact that there's no rendering or background, however I've decided to continue working on it for my portfolio, as there's no time for hand in.

And here are my initial orthographics that I used for modelling:

As can be seen I had to change quite a few aspects of the design for practicality and time purposes, plus tri budget (for example having decent looking roses ate up far too many tri's, and as they didn't add to the design or silhouette too drastically, I cut them out).

Here are the updated ortho's:

Here are the wireframe shots of my model:

I can see errors with my topology flow and in places, the density distribution, but that's something I will have to fix when I start polishing the character for my portfolio.

Here are some clay renders with max, which highlight even more where my topology needs to be improved, especially on the kimono.

And here the beauty shots (the best part):

Here are the textures I used for my model:

I channel packed my roughness, metalness and Ambient Occlusion into one map, and have my diffuse as a 32bit to support an alpha channel for the flowers and string on the model.

And here is my model in sketchfab: