Contextual Studies

For this Contextual Studies, I decided to look into online gaming. Specifically, how by allowing more players to be part of the same game has brought new ways to interact with each other and how this affects distribution.

I started by looking into the early stages of online play, looking at a game called MUD which was the first cross-network multiplayer game. While it didn't have much in the way of expanding distribution, it did allow players to play with each other over the internet which would later become the biggest impact of the industry.

I then looked into the first Massively Multilpayer Online game (MMO) which was Ultima Online. I looked into how it distributed itself over the internet and how the social aspects of the game (the communities and 'guilds') had an effect into creating it into what it was.

I then looked in to more recent games, such as EVE Online and looking at how its style of gameplay changes the way people interact with other players, how an in-game economy developed and how the corporations made by players within the game and how the various things that players can do, both legal and illegal (in terms of real society, whereas these actions - such as scamming and pirating - are legitimate gameplay within EVE) affect their way of interaction.

I then looked into upcoming games, looking at how their ways of bringing more cooperation to players is affecting distribution, how the new ways of cooperation is helping to push server capabilities further.

Life Drawing

Didn't do very much life drawing for this project and some of the drawings are too faint to be able to post for this project. Most of this project was focused on perspective drawing, how your perspective of form changes depending on what angle you are viewing an object from.

Sculpture

The sculpture took longer than I thought it would to create. It started off simply, creating the base body to work on. I used the ZSpheres to create the base model and then sculpted it into the shape I want, working from references of anatomy to try to perfect the form. I probably spent more time on this than I should have.

From there, I tried several different methods to try to make the clothing and armour. This was the part I really struggled with. At first, I tried making other base models, cutting them into the shapes I need and then building into them, but I couldn't get the hang of the cutting tools. After that, I then tried to take the model into Maya and make a base mesh of the general shape of the clothing and try to work from that. Again, I wasn't happy with the final outcome as it looked very low-poly compared to the rest of the sculpt and I still found it difficult to work with. I tried using the shadowbox method, but I just couldn't seem to make anything coherent with it. I was then shown the 'Extract' method, wherein you mask off an area of the sculpt, use the 'extract' tool and then that can be used to build into clothing. I was also shown the soft and hard polish tools for the hard surfaces, which I really struggled with. Once I understood the tools, creating all of the clothing and the character was much easier.

Turntable: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZkkOkmUFQg

Silhouettes and initial ideas

For BA5 I wasn't really sure what kind of character I wanted to create. The brief stated that the character had to be themed around one of the seven heavenly virtues, so I picked diligence, which is all about persistence and effort. I knew I wanted some kind of unorthodox design that doesn't immediately portray the virtue but when the character is put into its setting it starts to make more sense. This was so that I could create a more unique character and avoid a typical angelic theme.

I started by making the silhouettes, just making random blobs and using the pareidolia phenomenon to create shapes and characters out of them.

I decided to pick the silhouette on the last page, third one along of the bottom row. I quite liked the wasteland, ranger like appearance and figured I could make some kind of wanderer of a post-apocalyptic world who goes around helping people. My immediate thoughts of something similar was the Fallout series, so I very loosely took inspiration from it, being careful not to look too similar to the game's style while still making the appearance fit the theme.

I also took some inspiration from the upcoming game Destiny as I quite liked how the character designs looked. While the armour is shinier than what would b expected of a wasteland, it also looked like it had the kind of 'personal touch' that I would expect to see in such a game.