Thought tempest

Character designing begins!!! 

One of the things I knew I wanted to do with my designs was get a really great balance between being visually exciting and believably realistic. With a sci-fi design it is far too easy to go down the aesthetically awesome route and ignore reality when it gets in the way of your imagination, however the brief behind my project dictates that the design must fit the story, and the story is in the not too distant future. With this in mind I will be going about my designs with the idea that the technology has to pretty much exist today. This is meant to be cutting edge armour, and there is that rumour that military tech is always ten years ahead of public stuff, so I'm going to be able to push believability a little, but I want the audience to believe that this suit really could exist. 

The military use of this suit is actually very important. As I begun drawing I thought about what the military would do, based on what they have done before, and it dawned on me that in all military designs form follows function. They don't really care what things look like as long as they work perfectly. With this in mind I realised that my designs would have to be drawn with each panel, joint and division carefully planned and questioned as to why it was there. This looked like a job for a mind map. By thinking about all of the features the suit would have to have I could make sure they were incorporated into the design, and extra useless bits didn't manage to sneak in.

Hopefully you can read some of it:

If you take a look at that you will realise that I broke the armour down into its main functions it must perform and attempted to delve as deep as possible into each sub-category that arouse. Whilst the mind map proved to be incredibly useful, it did seem that the majority of what was effected where the small details. It helped me remember to add thruster nozzles and exhaust vents but it didn't affect the majority of the armour designs.

I knew pretty early on that I wanted the armour to be an all over suit rather than larger plates on top of an under suit because I couldn't design flexible elbow armour. This meant I needed to figure out the few really tough areas that most armours generally don't protect or prevent adequate movement, the arm pit, elbow, groin, knees and neck. Some testing was needed...