Finalising the character design

As time passed, emphasis was placed on getting the finer points of the character design, for the most part; the design was complete as the character had,

• A jetpack
• A hood or long scarf round the face
• Dynamic billowing fabric
• The colour range for the clothes would be taken from the selected colours in the design document.

However, the finer points of the character had to be defined to start the modeling process (what the hood or scarf looked like, how much face it covered, what the rest of the clothes looked like, the size and shape of the jetpack, what he would or would not hold, what weapons he would carry).

Most of the decisions around the character design came from predicting what was possible to model in Mudbox, Mudbox was enjoyable in the first year project and a high mark was ascertained from it, this could be repeated.

To finalise what would go round the head and face, character designs were studied from the digital games Assasins Creed, Soul Reaver and Star Wars the Force Unleashed 2 as all main characters from the games have their face covered up in some way.

These pictures from the games show different ways to cover the face.

As well as taking inspiration form these pictures, it was apparent that to achieve originality within the character design, the head design would have to look different as well as futuristic.

From a modeling standpoint, I was not confidant to try and model what looked like fabric around the face and shoulders, however, it may be possible to model a hood in Maya and then smooth it and make it appear as fabric in Mudbox.

To give the hood a futuristic and original touch, it is separate from the rest of the clothes, sitting on the shoulders (this was due to uncertainty in merging meshes in Mudbox)

The early design also showed that the sides of the hood were see-through to allow the character to see out the corner of his eyes. This was not possible to model in Maya, as only Polygon primitives would convert into Mudbox, this affected the design of the hood to not feature the see-through sides.

Through trial and error, the way the hood was finally modeled was purely in Mudbox, It was created by using a polygon sphere and the Grab tool to manipulate it to the shape of a hood, it was affective as it created the inside and outside of the hood in one object so merging meshes or unrealistic normals was not an issue. The Wax tool was used to make the hood look as though it was made out of fabric.