Visual Studies Hand In

Link to Portfolio: http://charlottewatson.weebly.com/

There are master posts on this blog for each project that are a clearer summary of my best design work.

The gallery also contains my best work from visual design this year. For a more extensive look at my design process and for more concepts please read this post.

Film Room

Whilst this project wasn't focused on visual design, elements of it did come into the preparation process for it, mostly involving careful analysis of the room in order to re-create it as accurately as possible.

Daredevil Master-board for reference.

Composition Analysis, to aid in matching the re-created still up to the original.

Posterised stills to aid in choosing the most interesting still, and the one with the most interesting lighting.

Birds eye view of the apartment to help with re-creating the layout as accurately as possible, and work out what is in the apartment.

Quick orthographic of the couch to aid in re-creating it.

Final render of the couch

Quick orthographic of the Armchair to aid in re-creating it

Final render of the Armchair

Comparison of final still (left) to the original (right)

Shot of final room

Final Lighting

Sentry Gun

I included lots of text to give a better idea of the process behind my concepting. Of course a picture is worth a thousand words, which Is why I also have a gallery:

of my visual design work, in case reading through to get to the pretty pictures becomes a bit too boring.

I tried to go for a consistent style with my concepts, and keep them clean and professional looking. Building off of one of our previous lectures I also wanted to have a go at starting to create a brand for myself. As my blog name is Atomic-Artist, and as someone that wants to keep my love of science reflected in my work as an artist, I decided to create a simple logo of an atom with a paintbrush through It, to represent my love of the two subjects. I also made the font a bit worn and faded to stick to an 'atomic' theme (playing off atomic as in atoms, and apocalyptic).

I knew straight away that I wanted to make a science themed sentry gun, and what better place to draw inspiration from, than a scientific principal that I'd already done extensive research on in the past; the microbial fuel cell.

Here is the report I wrote up on it in A level in case anyones interested:

https://atomicartist42.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/microbial-fuel-cell-power-source-of-the-future.pdf

In case anyone isn't interested, I'll briefly explain the principal here so that my gun and it's design makes more sense.

Micro-organisms can metabolize food, converting it from organic matter to a flow of electrons (electricity).

Fuel cells work like batteries in that they require an anode, a cathode and an electrolyte to run. However, unlike batteries they require a constant input of fuel to continue running. In this case, organic matter.

A Microbial Fuel Cell is a bio-electrochemical transducer that can convert organic matter (fuel) directly into electricity, via the metabolism of constituent bacteria.

What this means is that bacteria 'eat' the fuel and in doing so an electric charge is harnessed which can be used to power things. Water and Carbon Dioxide are generated by this process. However the Carbon Dioxide doesn't contribute to the Carbon Dioxide already in the atmosphere, because the carbon dioxide produced is carbon dioxide that was initially taken in by the renewable biomass.

Whilst working on this design I initially had 3 rough ideas that I kept in mind. One was going for a more retro/thrown together look, one was focusing more on an alien tech approach to this concept, and one was a mix of both, but with the retro looking a bit more modern.

My mood-board as a result, contained a mix of all three ideas, and other sources of inspiration, as well as practical reference for both drawing and modelling. Over the course of this project my mood-board kept growing and growing as I developed and refined my design.

I sectioned it up into relevant categories. These were; Defence, Microbial Fuel Cells, Guns, Giger, Turrets/Bases, Design/Colour, Battery/Components and Lab equipment.

My first step with concepting then, was to take shapes and silhouettes from my mood-board that I liked, or felt was relevant to the design (such as lab beakers) and create a 2D kitbash from them.

I then started putting shapes together, drawing in a few distinguishing details (I find it easier to work this way than with just pure silhouettes-especially as my gun is grounded in a real principal) and trying out the different Ideas for the turret I mentioned above.

I then developed them further following feedback. I've labelled my developments briefly on each concept. The main feedback I received for my designs was to make sure the bases of my turrets weren't too weak, as some of the designs were strong at the top but became weaker at the bottom, or sometimes vice versa. The beakers proved very popular so I was advised to keep them in the design, especially as they added an interesting game-play element to the gun. Since the glass is so fragile and the gun looks so unstable, it would be interesting to have them protected at the front of the gun by a shield, so that in order to destroy the gun the player would have to get around the shield and destroy the gun from the side by shooting the beakers. I really liked that idea, and so developed some of my concepts with a shield of some kind at the front of them.

Hopefully my developed concepts reflect this feedback.

Here are the initial and developed concepts I made using the 2D kitbash method:

3D concepting is something I was entertaining for a while, I just hadn't felt confident enough in my 3D skills to try it out until this project.

Luckily it was something that was introduced to me in game production, so I got to learn lots of modelling tricks to make my modelling faster. I also spent some time watching modelling tutorials on you-tube to pick up extra tricks in max, and I also just spent half a day playing around in max whilst concepting to see what it could do that I didn't know yet. As a result I've learnt lots of new tricks in max that made concepting for this project much, much faster and easier.

So anyway, the first thing I did was pick my two/three favourite developed designs and break them down into parts. I then modelled these parts and any extra things I could think of in max to create a 3D kitbash.

Reflecting back on it now, I realise I spent a bit too much time doing this, partly because I was experimenting with different techniques to make things, which is fine, but also because I let myself get a bit bogged down with the finer details, which are things I could have just painted over in Photoshop. After all they were meant to be white-box block outs. However it didn't set me back too much, thankfully.

Halfway though the process of putting my kitbash together for the gun, I realised that I'd stopped thinking about my underlying concept for it and so my design was getting a bit lost. This is when I went back to the scientific principal of a microbial fuel cell and drew up this diagram to explain how the gun works:

(which got a bit of face lift later on when using it in my final poster):

Drawing this up helped me to figure out what my gun NEEDED, and what was there for silhouette and well, the cool factor. It helped me work out what needed to be connected and why. It didn't matter how it was connected or where things were positioned, but it did help me work out what parts needed to be where in relation to each other. I also started to realise as I concepted that I was focusing on concepting from one side too much, and so my front silhouette was lacking a bit. I also started to think more and more about flow lines as I progressed, (something that was mentioned in Visual Design earlier on in the week). These considerations are why I chose design number 5 as my finalish design.

Here are the 3D concepts:

Another very good reason for concepting my gun in 3D is it allowed me to check it's functionality against the brief by putting it into engine very early on as a white-boxed version. The brief for this gun sets out very specific restraints for the model, in that it needs a base, a yaw (where it rotates horizontally), a gun pitch (where it'll move up and down vertically) and a barrel (from where the projectile is emitted). Luckily when I put my white-boxed gun into engine it worked perfectly fine with the blueprints, so now I know I can progress with this design, and just work on fleshing it out by adding detail, colour and value to it.

Cleaned up development concepts for presentation:

The next thing I did was a paint over of my white-boxed turret. I wanted to do multiple paint overs to really push my design forward, but had to make the judgement call that I only had time for one detail paint over, that I could use a rough orthographic for modelling my low poly turret.

However before doing my paint over I'd received feedback on my turret that the design was strong from the side, but that I'd neglected the front view, which is really important as it's what the player will see first.

So I did a quick white-box iteration of my design to strengthen the front silhouette. I did this by offsetting a few elements and adding in some extra components, that were still relevant to the design. These were the water-tank and sunlight, both of which were needed to keep the plant alive in the back of the gun, so it could continue to generate it's fuel source. I also received critique on putting more shape variation into my gun, as at the moment everything is quite spindly. I wanted to iterate on this as well, however with my level of focus that week, I had to make another judgement call and say to myself that I needed to make getting my high poly done by the end of the week a priority, which I did.

So these are the orthographics I worked from to create my high and low poly models, I included the flow lines I made when considering where to place things on my model:

(Edited Orthographic's for presenting)

I modelled my model before finishing my concept work, because I wanted to use 3D to speed up my concepting, for example I did all my value, material and colour development using renders of my 3D model, and editing them in Photoshop.

Material Iterations:

The only materials I really needed to define were what metals or metal my pipes would be, and to consider what other parts of the design, if any, would also be metal. To do my material iterations then I used substance painter. I simply loaded pre-set materials onto my low-poly model in substance, took a screenshot and put them all into photo-shop as layers on top of each other. I then used masks to try out different metal combinations, and occasionally used levels just to push things out a bit to get a sense for value too.

As my turret has a retro-esque style to it, and is loosely inspired by Victorian style lab equipment, I ended up choosing the brass and copper combination, as it was not only the most popular, but the metals worked well with the retro/Victorian style. As can be seen on my mood-board, brass was a metal that was used for Victorian lab equipment a lot, and copper is highly conductive so it makes sense practically for a gun that runs off electric charge.

I then created a series of swatches from my bacteria petri dish image for my colour scheme, like so:

Using these swatches and my chosen material combination, I then did some quick colour iterations using a colour layer over the top of my turret. Here they are:

Funnily enough most people tended to go for the blue, orange and green colour combinations. Now portal is one of my favourite games, and I hadn't intentionally tried to do a turret for it, and at first I was hesitant to use the orange and blue colour scheme, as I was worried it would look like I was just copying an existing product.

However Mike rightly pointed out that Valve doesn't own that colour combination, and that this turret is a portfolio piece. I decided then that why not tailor my turret to fit into the world of aperture science? It's a science gun, it has a retro feel to it, and colours that would slot it nicely into the old aperture laboratories. This would also make the promotional art much more fun for me, as I could really play around with the idea that it's an early aperture turret, and incorporate portal's dark humour into my 'advertising' of the gun.

So hey, the MFC Turret is now an early aperture experiment. Perhaps made on the fly to deal with an experiment gone awry?

I put together a mood-board for my promotional concept. I already knew there are 3 ways I wanted to present the final concept; blueprint, science illustration and a beauty shot (render from z-brush probably) so thats the kind of stuff I looked at for inspiration. Here is the mood-board:

A third year helped me do my value iterations really quickly by using a clown and lighting render from Max. Essentially I split all the parts of my model up into what would have different values, then applied a different value to each part (using a standard gradient-white-mid-dark, overall I think I used about 7 different values in max, though on reflection I think I should have used a standard 9 Value scale for consistency). I then rendered my model out and put the renders into photoshop. This meant that I could easily just select and fill the different values with new ones to create really quick value iterations.

I then picked my favourite/most popular value combination, and did one with the detail added to see how the final design would look before I put colour on it. The tricky part of doing the value iterations was that the different metal pipes would have to be the same value in each iteration, it was only the things around the pipes I could change the value of. However I think I ended up with a design that reads quite clearly, and is nicely broken up, although colour will certainly help in breaking it up just that bit more (as the separate pipes will be more obviously different then).

I then used my finalised colour scheme (I picked all the colours from the most popular colour concepts and created a swatch from them, as well as choosing set colours for the metal and wood), to do a few colour concepts. I only needed a few as I already had a very clear idea of the colours I wanted to use, and where they'd go on the design. The patterns I put onto the design were inspired by cells, bacteria and popular retro patterns, as well as from portal's very own distinctive patterns, as shown on the mood-board:

The most popular colour scheme was selected, and so I finally had a final concept.

Here are my value and colour iterations:

And here is the finalised concept at it stood initially.

Finally here is the final promotional poster I ended up with:

I did it in the style of a science poster pinned to a lab wall, and included some of the distinct dark humour that Aperture include on their posters.

To make my retro science paper I used a screenshot from marmoset as my base.

I then played around with layer effects in Photoshop and used the old paper base I've used for all my concepts for consistency. I played around with various brushes, and created a lab wall background for the poster to be pinned to. The text I added to it to keep with the humour of the game, adding in subtle insults and so on.

I spent a lot of time considering the layout of my poster which I referenced from various pieces of science illustration I'd gathered that inspired me. I also cleaned up my illustration of how the gun works and added it in as a nice bit of 'science info' to make the poster feel more informative and less purely aesthetic.

Blueprints matches that technical feel to aperture laboratories, and when searching for portal promotional art, I came across quite a few blueprints of the famous portal gun, and sentry turrets. Therefore I made a blueprint poster for my gun as well.

To create the blueprints then, I did clay renders from Max using the quick-line silver renderer as this gave me the cleanest results. I initially tried to use the tech render but it didn't catch all the lines that I needed it to, so I got a better result doing that in Photoshop. In Photoshop then I used 'filter-stylise-find edges to get my gun outlined. This did most of the work for me, but I did have to go in and clean up/add a few of the edges by hand. I also added 'stroke' to the layer to get more of a variation in line depth.

I was following this tutorial for the blueprints:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZC_aHeVKAk -blueprints

I used the tape measure tool in max to get the measurements for my gun, in response to feedback that adding some technical measurements would help sell the gun as something created for manufacturing purposes.

So here are the final blueprints I ended up with:

I'm fairly pleased with how the promotional concepts. turned out. It's the first time I've actually done some promotional artwork for a project and despite the stress I am glad it's getting pushed this year, as it really prepares me for creating a proper portfolio. Plus it's always nice to see your design presented as you envisioned it, rather than as the messy concepts I start out with. All in all despite the utter stress this project has caused me, it's been a huge learning curve (as always) and I'm proud of the outcome. It's certainly the best work I've produced in a long time (design and execution wise). I also really enjoyed learning engine more, and am looking forward to working in it more in the future. I'd really like to learn how to do more work with visual effects and blueprints!

Finally, here are some renders of the gun in Marmoset and engine, to compare the concepts to the final product:

And here are the textures:

Dichotomous Duo, Character Project

I had lots of ideas for this project initially, but the one I ended up taking forward to the concepting stage was the oriental twist on the Greek King and Queen of the underworld Hades and Persephone.

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.

The first thing I did was fill out these character creation matrixes to get a better idea of who my characters were and why I was creating them:

So these are the mood-boards I put together for the two characters:

I chose to make Persephone as I felt that she was challenging enough to stretch me, but not too intimidating as a first attempt at a realistic character. Hades with his more complex outfit and aged face presented technical difficulties that I didn't feel equipped enough to cope with just yet. I decided early on with Persephone's character design that I would make her simple enough to model well, but bring more complexity to her design with texturing and a more intricate headpiece to keep the attention on the face, and illustrate her importance as a character.

I did a fair bit of research into kimono's and Asian clothing in preparation for making Persephone in 3D. Like so:

I researched everything from Samurai to Geisha to Flowers to Skull. Everything on the design has a reason to be there, informed by extensive research into symbolism and culture. I wanted to avoid feature creep. Even the patterns on her sash and sugar skull have meaning. The pattern on her sash is actually a visual representation of the myth behind her captivity in the underworld, and the symbol on the skull is the Chinese symbol for 'underworld.' The other patterns on her design were created by studying existing oriental patterns, as well as being inspired by intricate henna designs.

Here are some patterns I designed:

Even the colour was researched, which is why I went for harmonious colour schemes as these are used extensively in traditional Japanese art.

I chose sugar skulls as my inspiration for her skull because I love how something traditionally morbid is made into something beautiful through use of colour and pattern. I wanted to give her a skull to remind people she is the queen of the underworld, but to soften it with flowers and patterns to remind people that she is also still the goddess of spring.

Having flower imagery on her design was important to me not only because of their symbolic meaning as flowers, but also because they represent her role as the goddess of spring, and are a good visual metaphor for how the underworld is affecting her. For example the pattern on her kimono shows cherry blossom blooming at the top, but towards the bottom the flowers have died, and petals are starting to fall. Showing how the underworld is stripping her off her power to bring life to nature.

I started out with a few very quick thumbs to loosen up:

I then went onto to do four costume iterations, I then combined my favourite parts of those designs into a final(ish) design. This changed quite a bit when I made the orthographic's, and I'm sure it will change further once I start making it in 3D, but it's a good starting point for now.

I then did some photobash/painted pattern iterations to get an idea for the kind of patterns her costume would have. This is was particularly important as I'm making the clothing relatively simple in shape, with no added props, but bringing complexity in by adding lots of detail to the clothing.

I also did some head-dress iterations. Initially I did my face and head-dress designs on paper, mostly because I missed sketching, but also because I found it easier to get my head into the work that way:

I then did some quick combined iterations in Photoshop, by combined I mean I picked out my favourite parts of the pencil sketches and mushed them together, added, took away etc.

Here they are all together:

And here's a close up of the patterned designs at the bottom:

Next I did some face iterations. This is my absolute favourite part of the design process as faces are my comfort zone. I was also focusing on designing her make-up whilst I did this. I wanted to make this serve a purpose too, which Is why I opted for the make-up that shaded out the top of her face slightly, to represent the darkness of the underworld starting to consume her. I chose to keep her face and head-dress designs separate, because I didn't want people to be biased when choosing a favourite, for example if they love the head-dress they may pick that one even if the face isn't that strong.

Here are the faces:

I decided to go for the rounder faces as they gave a more innocent feel to the character, as round shapes are often associated with friendly good characters. However I want her to still be interesting and just a little more intimidating in appearance as she is a queen, so I exaggerated some features slightly such as her eyes and lips, and used make-up to make her design more striking and less soft in places, such as the cheeks.

And here is the final face design I ended up with:

Once I had a relatively clear idea of her design I made some orthographic's:

On reflection I feel like I could have been a lot more creative with her costume design, although I did what I could in the time given to me, and whilst her design is by no means as good as it could be, I'm still quite pleased with how it's turned out, especially as I find characters particularly challenging to concept.

As can be seen In the orthographic's, 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).

I created my character by sculpting the high poly first in Z-brush. Getting the face right was my primary focus, and I made sure to do lots of research into Japanese face characteristics, and ask for lots of feedback along the way. Here is an example of how the face progressed based off of feedback:

It's changed quite a bit from the original face concept, but that's down to more extensive study of faces whilst I was creating it.

I concepted the head-dress quite a bit in 3D as well as 2D, since I didn't have the side Orthographic for the head-dress that complete when I went in with the design. This is because I struggle to think in 3D so I decided to problem solve in 3D as I went along, and it worked out quite nicely as I think I ended up with an interesting side and front silhouette, despite the cutbacks I made to the concept.

This is just one of the mood-boards I used as reference for creating and designing the head-dress:

Here are the updated Orthographic's for the character, that show the changes made to the design, when compared to the original Orthographic's I made.

And here is my development sheet for both characters, cleaned up considerably:

Hades design iterations took place in a very similar way.

I researched a lot into Samurai and Knight armour, as can be seen on his mood-board, and tried to design him so that he looked much harsher and sharper than his soft bride, however I wanted to keep some softer fabric in his design so that the two designs weren't completely at odds with each other.

Here are his initial designs:

I really liked the side and back cloaks on my designs, so I decided to combine the two, I also preferred the more traditional samurai armour, paired with the jagged leg and arm gauntlets. Therefore I combined my favourite parts of each of the first 5 designs, into the more finalised design on the bottom right.

I then did some face and head-dress iterations for Hades:

In the end I went for a combination of the longer, more triangular face (to use shape to demonstrate a harsher, more dangerous personality, but the sadder expression, and combined make-up of the other designs. I knew I wanted to put horns on Hades head-dress, to create a link to Persephone's design, and to draw parallels to demons, and other creatures of the underworld. I went for the more organic looking horns, as they linked better to the metaphor of new life growing from the darkness, which is why I put flowering buds onto the final design, to contrast Persephone's dying flowers on her Kimono.

For colour I used clown renders of Persephone's model, and my final concept for Hades to iterate faster.

I based Persephone's colour scheme off of traditional Japanese art and Geisha colour combinations. They tend to use harmonious colour schemes and so I used one for Persephone too. I also opted for the lighter more spring like colours as that suits her character more. The pink, purple, blue and gold are all from a harmonious colour scheme, but they're also colours that make me think of spring. The flowers, the sky and the sun.

One thing I do find frustrating with creating colour concepts is the annoyance when you find a good value combination and good colours, but when you try and combine them you end up with a very different colour scheme. In the end I decided to combine the two processes and do my value iteration with my colour concepts, I.e. adjusting the values to match the colours as I went along.

So here are the colour concepts along with the chosen final colour scheme:

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. I would have liked to put more work into his colour scheme, but time was against me on this project, and overall, i'm satisfied with the one I ended up with.

I then moved on to creating a final concept.

I was inspired by how total war shogun presented their concepts in the style of the culture they were re-creating. I think it demonstrates how the characters would fit into an ancient world and also highlights how their designs work without any unnecessary 'dressing.' I felt like this final concept best represented the style I was going for with these characters, ancient and simple, yet aesthetically pleasing.

I used this mood-board for reference when creating my final concept:

I also used it when creating the poster for my character presentation

So my final concept went through a few stages. Here they are:

I added the background in response to feedback from the presentation, to give the piece more context, and allude to the characters being part of an actual world, rather than as floating designs.

Overall I'm very pleased with the outcome of this project, and am proud of how far my design work has come since last year.

Here are some beauty shots to compare the concepts with the final product:

I also created this image of my character in a game like Tomb-raider, to illustrate how the character would look in a game environment, and give her more purpose than as a stand-alone design:

Finally I made this poster to fully show off the design, and summarise the best pieces of work from my design process:

Here are the textures for the final model:

(I used this reference when texturing the skin to get an idea for what colours I should use):

Off the Map

I was heavily involved in deciding the look of our level for Off the Map, so I put together a mood-board to aid the general development of our level, and to aid the character artists in their concepts:

General:

Character:

I put together this mood-board as part of my pitch for the layout and gameplay of the level:

I also concepted this to help aid the look development of Oberon for the character artists, unfortunetely he wasn't created for the final level, but I'm proud of it nonetheless:

I also did these quick concepts for a few of my assets:

And finally here are stills of clearing 1 and 2, demonstrating all the work I did with lighting, post processing, composition(asset placement) visual effects and so on.

If they look dark, it's because I didn't manage to get the level to look light enough on all different types of monitors, it reads fine on a cintique or monitor with a better graphics card, but otherwise it can come across as a bit too dark. I will be working on this further, to make it look good on all the different monitors it may be viewed on.

Finally, Life Drawing

Early Year

Mid Year

End of Year

I feel like my use of tone, and understanding of underlying anatomy has really improved this year, though I would have liked to work a bit more on tone this year, though that is something I should maybe have worked more on in my own time. I've learnt for next year however, as I will be continuing life drawing as a personal activity.