Hope your ready for an image dump...

So these are the best of the image that I have collected. They are a mixture of 2D and 3D and a mixture of styles. There are some images where I like the whole design and some where I only like small elements, and plenty in between. All of these images resulted from simple google searches for generic terms and I simply saved the results that I liked the most. I will follow this post up with an analysis of the elements that I think I like and will therefore try to include in my armour design. Here we go!

So what have I learnt from all these? Well the most obvious answer to that question is in the helmet, I definitely like them to be faceless, that doesn't necessarily mean featureless, but having no visible eye slot or hole is a big plus. Having lights or cameras or something in place of lights but not quite positioned correctly is even better. In fact lights in general seem to be pretty good, for eyes, on weapons, around exhausts, its all good.

The second point is that I seem to be fond of armour with very smooth panels and sharp edges. I feel like this leads to the most futuristic look. Too many sharp edges could lead things to be blocky and bulky more like an '80s imagining of the future but smooth panels with sharp definition lines is more like a 2011 view of the future.

The trends I'm seeing in terms of the armours mobility is to have large panels across the big body parts with the pieces getting smaller and more complex on the areas where flexibility is needed. Armoured parts combined with a kind of stiff rubber or other semi-flexible material under suit is an idea that gets repeated a lot and I am quite a fan of.

In general I quite like complex but minimal shapes in the armour panels. What I mean by this is that the armour appears quite faceted with many sharp angle changes and planes, but it is not cluttered up with lots of extra bits, like pouches, straps, pockets, holsters, if those things exist the have been hidden away or designed into the armour itself.

PS. I do not own any of these images and they are property of their respective owners.

This has cleared my mind up in terms of the design elements that I want to include and give me some more topics to research. Next time I'll be looking at real armours and hard surfaces which may have elements to incorporate into my design. Stay tuned...

Research

Now that I have a pretty good idea of what I actually want to do and what the outcome will be I have to begin research to make sure I can actually do it. As covered in my previous post there are a number of research areas to look into before I can really start work.

At the most basic level these are: armour research to help in my concept design, sculpting research to make sure I know how to actually make this thing, and a lot of smaller peripheral topics like my dynamic effects.

First up, the design. Concept research is a multi pronged attack. I want my armour design to be realistic, obviously nothing like this currently exists and therefore I will be imagining a fair chunk of my design, however I want to make sure it is based in reality. This means I need to look for all of the real reference that I can and use the ideas contained within when designing my armour suit. I will be looking at what really exists today as these inventions are the ground work that an armour design like mine will eventually grow from.

With the present covered I will also be turning to the past for some tips. It has been many centuries since mankind has used plate armour but there were more centuries before that where they did. They faced a similar challenge that I am, protection vs manoeuvrability, and they came up with lots of answers. I will be taking a leaf out of their book to see how they made plates slide over one another to give the wearer the most flexibility possible.

And finally I shall be looking to the future, kind of. Nothing like my eventual armour design exists but similar designs have been created in a non-functional way. Costume armour like created for the movie Iron Man doesn't have all of the features that the movie would have you believe, but it was created as a full scale wearable suit that someone had to move in. Seeing how this more modern design achieved similar results to that of medieval armour could give me an insight into how to go about my design.

However, making the suit realistic enough is only one stage of the design phase, it also needs to look awesome. As such I am gathering as much reference material from across the web as I can. When I have gathered as many pictures of sci-fi armour that I think looks great I can try and distill what it is exactly that makes it aesthetically appealing and then put that into my armour. I already have lots of images so I will be looking through them and showing off the best ones here in a coming post.

I will also be covering the other area of research in a following post. Continue to watch this space for more major project news.

Final Decisions..

The first assessment for this project is to answer some basic questions about your project which is meant to help formalise the idea within your mind, and help describe it clearly to others.


The questions and my answers are below, so if you wanna learn all the nitty gritty details, read on...


Name: Christian Hood

Project title: Equipped for Battle

The Concrete outcome: The outcome of my project will be a highly detailed 3D model in the form of a digital statue created in the digital sculpting program Zbrush. It will include high quality textures, a lighting setup that best portrays it and multiple angle renders. If time allows I will include multiple alternate character designs. I would also love to be able to print my final design as a physical object, although more research needs to be done before I can decide whether this is a realistic outcome.

Theme or content of the project: The content of my project is futuristic, sci-fi style character using hard surface sculpting techniques to create a photo realistic armour design that could be used in films or games.

Creative aims: The creative goals of my project are to create a visually enticing design. I intend to do this through a combination of exciting dynamic effects, photo realistic textures and renders and an exciting, imaginative, yet believable armour design. The sculpt will be a single static moment, but I want it to tell an instantly recognisable story, a single moment of action, explaining the function of this armoured suit and the situation it is in.

Technical aims: There are many technical skills that I aim to practice, develop and use within this project. Firstly I intend to design the character that I will be sculpting, this will include armour and potentially weapon design, two areas of character design which I feel are important and I am not as confident doing. The design phase will also require me to create concept art from multiple angles to aid in the transition between 2D concept and 3D model, this is a skill which I am fairly confident with but have not had much practice with. The sculpt it’s self if the main technical hurdle, as hard surface sculpting is a new area to me and a difficult art form to get precise as each surface must be perfectly smoothed as if it had been crafted by a machine. One of my ideas with this design is to attempt to include dynamic effects such as water and smoke, these are areas that I have never worked in before and as such could present me with a number of technical difficulties, however I have faith that I will be able to create these effects in the way I need them and that they will increase the aesthetic quality considerably. The final phase of the sculpt will be to texture, light and render the model to best display my original idea and the sculpt itself. I have plenty of practice within this area working within Maya, however if time allows I will attempt to do most of this within Zbrush, to minimise program switching. This will also allow me to try my hand at Polypainting, a method of texturing I have not used previously.

Who will be the target market/audience: The target audience of my project is for other  3D artist to enjoy and learn from. It will also serve as a basis to show of my ability to complete concept work and high end modeling. As such it the sort of sculpt that would be aimed at artistic directors on film and game productions.

How will target market/audience benefit from your work: My project is designed to entertain other artist who look at it, and to inspire them to create their own works. For use within film and game production as a demonstration of concepts and designs my project aims to inform the artistic director and enable them to make decisions about my design. This could lead to the design being accepted and the film or game asset produced, at which stage my design and model would be used to inform and educate the asset creation team further down the pipeline.

Your research areas: There are a few main areas that I need to develop research in order to complete my project most effectively. The largest are of this is in technical research. As there are many technical hurdles within my project each one of these must be addressed, research and a solution found. These areas include the technical difficulties and process of creating hard surface sculpts that will work for the model I design. How to Polypaint and how this technique will work with my final design to make it look the best that it can. Finding a program or plug-in that will allow me to create smoke and water effects in a way that suits the style and vision of my project that can also be rendered convincingly and easily within the time frame.


The design itself will also require a fair bit of research. Ultimately I want the design to appear real and rendered to a photorealistic quality, as such the initial concepts need to be designed with this in mind. I will need to design the individual armour panels/plates in such a way that they look like they can convincingly move over one another and still allow the wearer to move freely. This will require looking at real life examples of armoured suits and understanding the construction methods, as well as researching fictional examples and developing a style that will enable these realistic pieces to also be aesthetically exciting. 


Ultimately I would be thrilled if my final model could be printed using a 3D printer, and if possible coloured too. I will therefore need to do some research into companies who provide such a service and if this is a practical aim.

Success measure: The main success measure for this project will be completing all of the individual elements satisfactorily  and in line with the original design intention. However as a further incentive to make this a particularly amazing piece of work, I would like this sculpt to take the main place in my portfolio which will hopefully lead to me gaining a job creating sculptures and models in the film or games industry. I will also submit some of my final images or work in progress shots to Zbrush Central, the website and forum of Zbrush makers and artists in an atempt to gain a place on the prestigious ‘Top Row’, a banner of the best works from the site that takes pride of place at the top of every page on the website.

What to do?...What to do?

So of course the first decision of a project like this is to decide what exactly I am going to do.

There are very few guidelines put in place by Raffles, which in my opinion is a great thing, lets us spread our wings. However I know that this project needs to be larger in scale than anything I have worked on before, and it needs to demonstrate the skills and techniques that I am most interested in working on in my eventual career.

Hmm...tough one. I am studying video games design and so the obvious first choice is to make a game. I'm in games design for the art side however and have no idea at all how to program, or have any close friends who know either. So making a game isn't really realistic, but game art is an option. I decided to study video game design because of the huge amount of crossover with film visual effects, another area I am interested in working. Most specifically 3D modelling characters, environments and effects not possible in practical effects.

So there is an obvious crossover, and choice here, a 3D model of some sort. My main area of skill, and interest lies within character design and modelling, so another obvious choice presents itself, a 3D character of some sort. The industry standard 3D modelling tools (in both film and games industry) include 3DStudio Max and Maya which are traditional modelling software and a 3D sculpting tool, ZBrush. 3DS Max and Maya are owned by the same company and are basically the same program and I have been taught to use Maya, so I will use that where needed. However, the idea of 3D sculpting is much more compelling to me, as it fairly accurately portrays the feeling and process of sculpting in real life.

As I come from a background of fine art training, and have practice sculpting, I am very interested to try out ZBrush. Plus I think the results just look better. And so I decided, a 3D sculpture of a character made in ZBrush. Getting here was pretty easy, but there is still a way to go. Even though I knew I wanted to sculpt a character, that leaves a lot of scope. And so I began to search for inspiration, something that would grab me by the eyeballs and make me scream 'I want to make that!' I didn't take long to find either.

I don't know exactly what it is about this sculpture by Mike Jensen that I love so much. Maybe its the perfectly smooth panels, the incredible attention to detail or just the fact that it looks like you could reach out and touch it. But I knew once I saw it that I had found what i wanted to do with my major project. A 3D hard surface character sculpture in ZBrush. Yet I still wanted more, a 3D sculpt was good but was it good enough? Else would excited my to make, inspire me every time I sat down to start work? 

I have read many times professional 3D artists say that you should never show work in a T-pose, it is too unnatural, even the smallest amount of posing would help viewers relate to the character so much more. So what if I put my character into a dynamic action pose, with a small environment around them to sell the effect? And what if that environment was as enticing to make as the character itself? So how about a futristic Iron man-esque character flying low over water creating water disruption like this? That sounds pretty good to me. 

And so I have decided: a 3D ZBrush sculpt of a futuristic, sci-fi armour design, dynamically posed as it flies over water, fully lit, textured and rendered to photo realistic levels. Watch this space.

And so it begins...

As I come to the end of my second year at Raffles I start on what will no doubt be my largest and most ambitious project to date. I hope that it will also be my most visually stunning and the crown of my portfolio. My Major Project.

The intention of this blog is so that you can follow along with my progress and see all of the steps taken to produce my final work. In the end some of the information I gather here may be a great resource for showing my process, technicals skills and all of the work that goes into a project of this size but can't possibly be displayed along side the final work. This blog is a behind the scenes look into how the project that defines my time at uni came to be.

And so without further ado...