Project Rational:
"Character Design, visual style and functionality" was one many choices of brief that we were allowed to pick, I chose this one in particular since I find the field of character design and animation of great interest, and whilst the "Body Dynamics, weight and impact" looked like a lot of fun, and "Character animation, dialogue and communication" looked like a great chance to explore the aspects of delivering a believable performance in CG, I felt that the former would allow me to explore away from the bipedal, life based models that I've been used to working with so far.
I relished the challenge of finding only three out of hundreds of possible characters from Neil Gaiman's Sandman. Finally choosing the trio of Guardians from Dream's fortress. My reason for picking the guardians is that it would be a unique challenge to attempt non-biped models for the first time, and by taking on three different models, I felt that I could iterate a first attempt, and continually improve through subsequent iterations.
I did a great deal of sketching for each of the three guardians, which were the Wyvern, the Hyppogriff and the Griffon. The Wyvern was a pleasure to re-imagine, as there are a great many ways to reinterpret a creature such as a dragon, and I experimented with lots of shapes and proportions in my pre-design sketches, which were done loosely in Photoshop.
However, when it came to redesigning the Griffon and Hyppogriff, there was a bit less leeway, since source material inferred that the two creatures were physically similar, yet I wanted to create designs that gave each one an individual vibe by exercising some artistic license with my design choices.
During the course of modelling the characters, I explored different ways to model functional wings for each of the characters, my favourite outcome being that of the Wyvern, which, whilst heavily stylized and physically impossible, had an overall aesthetically pleasing wing design and flying animation, though I did run into some issues with attaching cloth groups to CAT-bones, an issue that I would like to revisit again in my spare time.
Luckily, the internet and media has a great deal of relevant source material, I sought this in the form of aviary flight videos, natural world photography and special effects predecessors that tackled similar subject matter such as "Walking with Dinosaurs, BBC".
Thankfully I had learn a lot of lessons since the last project, and whilst time management was somewhat of an issue again (Due to external circumstances) I felt that I'd coped better than previously in terms of budgeting my time to fit deadline constraints, and made best use of the informal extension to fiddle out some of the creases in my work so to speak.
Thankfully the rendering checklist idea paid off and I managed to get it all rendered and edited within good time, with no hitches!
My goal next term is to expand my horizons and explore more rigorous lighting, texturing and rendering settings, as I now have much more robust hardware to cope with the stresses that I aim to throw at it.
Over the summer I aim to produce some high quality model assets with the assistance of Polycount.com, and maybe even get some exposure in the modelling and animating community.
