charleshwright

[charleshwright]

Concept Art Update

This week I updated my concept art on my character 'Silver Bullet' by adding a secondary light source and more highlights with a soft brush to blend the values better. I also played around with a few eye designs and settled on a small glimmer of something in her eye to keep the Sci-Fi atmosphere present. I also worked on this character whop will be the boss antagonist of my IP as well as some logo development.

[charleshwright]

Concept Art Update

This week I updated my concept art piece based on my character 'Silver Bullet', adding more shadow and value for depth as well as working on the gun a little to bring out some detail. I also finished these designs of my other main characters seen below.

I also created some simple textures in Quixel Mixer and imported my axe asset to Ue4 to apply my textures.

[charleshwright]

Concept Art Update

over the past week I worked on my Concept Art Piece. based on various feedback I enhanced the saturation of skin tone and brought the eyes out more with a brighter green as well as working into the hair and value, which I will finish off with a finer brush where needed.

I also finished this character design based on Brian Blessed seen below and began work on creating a weapon design and recreating the design within Autodesk Maya.

Above is the initial sketch that was used to create the final design (source of reference below)

https://www.darrenaltman.com/brian-blessed-impressionist/

Below shows my progress on the Axe, this characters chosen weapon.

[charleshwright]

Concept Art Update

Today I worked on my concept artwork previously created in traditional format. I digitally scanned the sketch and worked into it using my own custom brush to give the canvas painted effect.

I specifically updated the hair to a better shape and started adding details to give the impression of hair strands. I changed the hair style previously drafted as I wasn't happy with how the hair flowed, making it difficult to add detail that looked accurate.

I also updated the gun from its previously 2d looking positioning to the angle you see below, I used a Desert Eagle as reference fro the basic shape of the weapon.

Desert Eagle reference source: https://hum3d.com/360-view/?id=86355

As well as this I also finalised these world building concepts for my environment.

[charleshwright]

Sketches and Concept Art

Today I used my references gained in Magic Poser, an app that allows the user to set up the position of multiple figures in any shape or position and capture these poses for use as reference. The first sketch was based on the Magic poser position I did, referencing Aron Elekes’s Mortal kombat X concept art to create my pose and my previously designed character to create the clothing desgin.

One thing id like to improve upon on this design is the posture of the top half of the torso as I think it needs repositioning to gain the full potential of strength that this pose can exhibit, the shoulders and head could move back a little.

As well as these sketches I wanted to try create a portrait, utilising the same style as Aron Elekes's 'paintier' method of creating concept art, I started to create a portrait of this character using a basic sketch I created using an angry emotion reference from google. (source for reference under sketch)

Below is an image of my previously created character that I also finalised this week, giving me a good direction for my other concept designs.

reference image source: Laura Marie, St Anger https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/111041947045713201/

In this piece of work I have tried to concentrate on exhibiting a wider range of skills using more realistic style, value and colouration as well as custom brushes to achieve the acrylic scraped paint look although I am still blocking out colour and design at the moment. at this point the face is the most developed part of the piece.

[charleshwright]

Magic Poser

Today I used an app called Magic Poser in order to create and plan a group composition for my characters in the same style as the previously researched ‘Bengus’ used to create his flyer artwork. Magic Poser is great for setting up poses as it allows for free movement of most of the joints giving accessible and easy use, also offering a range of models and assets that are free to use.

Here I managed to create a few different scenes, this first image shows the group scene before I had start looking at references, while the one below it was created using reference of two images for Tekken 7 (shown below). The idea was to have a few main focus characters and have the rest of the characters as a secondary focus.

during the development of my Magic poser skills, I created a pose based on the concept art Aron Elekes created for Mortal combat X. I loved this character’s pose as it made the female character seem so strong, proud, and confident. The leg and chest placement in particularly is placed to give the greater impression of a solid stance and posture.

[charleshwright]

Street Fighter Research

There were many Street Fighter Artists to choose from many generations of the game, although one caught my eye particularly. Naoto “Bengus” Kuroshima or just Bengus as he is referred to, is a Japanese illustrator, Character Designer and Game Creator. He was one of the earlier Capcom designers which helped design the CAPCOM aesthetic that is loved so much in their community. As well as this he was the key Artist for Street Fighter 5.

Exhibited Above are two flyer artworks created by Bengus, on the top for Super Street Fighter 2: The New Challengers (1993) and on the bottom, Ultra street Fighter 2: The Final Challengers (2017). In these are very different styles to that of Mortal kombat X (2015) or Tekken 7 (2015) showing lots of anime qualities and even more saturation throughout.

After looking at more of his artwork including that of some produced for CAPCOM (see below) I decided this would be one of the styles I would try and replicate to see if it suited my game IP aesthetic.

Source: Bengus, CAPCOM database.

Available at: https://capcom.fandom.com/wiki/Bengus

Accessed: 04/05/2021

Posted: 05/05/2021

[charleshwright]

Mortal Kombat X Research

Jim Thacker (2015) shares in his article for Art Station magazine that there were many artists for different stages of development of Mortal Kombat X, some including character design, marketing artwork and concept artwork.

For example, this concept design work for Character D’vorah by Marco Nelor is a lot different when contrasted with the realistic traits of later development of characters such as this Marketed piece below of character Scorion by concept artist Serg Souleiman.

Another form of these later designs comes in between the market ready artwork and design work, which is concept art. This type of art exhibits a concept of the final product or design pre-market. These pieces of artwork below by Freelancer Aron Elekes are brilliant examples of this.

Source: Art Station Magazine, The Grousomely beautiful art of Mortal Kombat X (2015)

Available at: https://magazine.artstation.com/2015/06/art-mortal-kombat/

Accessed: 04/05/2021

Posted: 05/05/2021

[charleshwright]

Tekken Research.

The artist researched within the Tekken series was Tomoko Odashima, lead character director of Tekken 7.

Tomoko Odashima (2017) states in an IGN interview, this character ‘Gigas’ was interesting and unique in respect to the other character designs developed.

Odashima also shared some great knowledge of her field stating that “Developing a character usually entails coming up with a rough sketch or concept that the team can work off to try to get the visual look of it closer to everyone’s image of what the character should be”.

Considering this I could develop one of my character designs further to gain stronger characteristics and really strengthen the “image” of what I wanted the character to be.

In the same interview Kei Kudo, Program Director of the same project also shared some interesting notes on the dev teams switch to Unreal engine from previous methods was a major change and resulted in characters blending into the background. This was something they had to work around to achieve their desired aesthetic. (Kudo, 2017)

Source: IGN, Inside the Development of Tekken 7

Available at: http://www.avoidingthepuddle.com/news/2017/1/29/ign-video-inside-the-development-of-tekken-7.html

Accessed: 04/05/2021

Posted: 05/05/2021