Reflection of Game art, week Fifteen

Returning back from the Christmas break to start a new project. Started off with a lecture about character design for the new village character project and looked at Andrew loomis's work with anatomy. I found Andrew loomis work very interesting and will try my own studies of heads and faces.

Drawing heads and hands, Andrew loomis

A task we have been given is to photograph interesting people in the street of different age groups, this is to start the design process of character design. Also to photograph ourselves expressing twelve different face expressions. During digital painting lesson, I learnt about human proportions from head ratio to the rest of the body. For example shoulders are three head, arms are 3 heads down (with two heads for the lower arm) legs are four heads, the average height is 7.5 or 8 heads and hands are usually face size, so slightly smaller than a head.

In life drawing this week as we had started the character project and are learning about human proportions and anatomy, we went back to basics drawing proportions. First we started with warm up sketches of two minute continuous line and then opposite hand, this is to stimulate both sides of the brain and loosen up my drawing for later sketches.

I also drew a two minute line sketch just using lines to mark the shape and weight distribution. 

This is a two minute blind drawing, which I did not look at the page and keep looking at the figure to draw.

In these proportion sketches I tried to think more about the anatomy with the muscles, adding volume and weight to the figure. In this first standing proportion drawing, I used the head to measure the rest of the body then marked in the weight distribution of the shoulders and hips, then started sketching in the figure by measuring angles around and on the body.

In the second sketch, I took the same approach with drawing the figure, by using the head to measure the rest of the body and then marking in weight distribution, I felt I achieved capturing volume well, however my measuring of proportions was incorrect slightly and had to make changes. I think the volume of the figure weight distribution and foreshortening added heaviness to the figure to make it seem weighted into the seat. I also had to think about foreshortening , which did not prove a problem as I used my measuring to achieve it.

In the last standing sketch, I had a pose front on to myself, which made it easy to achieve proportions, therefore I tried adding more volume and muscle anatomy to the figure. I did not focus of any rendering this time in any of my drawings, as I wanted to focus of the proportions and volume using line.

Continuing the theme of anatomy, In the Game production lesson we started practicing modeling a female character. I used the template and tutorials provided, which I was able to achieve a finished model by the end of the lesson. This task proved fairly simple for myself, as I understood the tutorial very well and could solve problems by myself were the tutorial was not clear.

Here are the renders of the female character model, including smoothing groups added on the right.