Visual Design - Insectoid Character Design

Moodboard

This is my moodboard of insect images which I gathered. The assignment was to create and insectoid character (insect based humanoid) and we could use any insect to do this or just take features from different insects. I chose to take features from insects to create a more interesting and original design.

Front, Side and Back Views:

The above image shows the outlines of different angles of the insect character I'm creating. This task was rather tedious and took up a lot of time, especially drawing the side view version. But never the less, this task allowed me to visualise my ideas easier and visualise what the three quarter view may look like. 

Description of Character:

The main idea I had for my character is that I want to to be a fighter, a wise insect which knows martial arts (ridiculous I know). I thought it would either be interesting in game as an enemy or perhaps a character which teaches the player a skill or something. Those were my initial ideas. I thought it would live in a forest/swamp area, maybe also on a mountain. It would've gotten this way from viewing humans from a distance, the character would be a similar size to a human but had to view them from a distance under fear of being chased, feared or hunted. And because of this it learnt self defensive by observing the very beings he's most afraid of.

Final Piece:

I'm rather pleased with how my final piece turned out. I used a mixture of techniques to draw this, although it could've had more detail I am definitely happy with the results. I used a paint over technique to get the scaling on the chest, shoulders and waist area. I also used the burn and dodge tool and experimented with them for the highlights/shadow. 

The piece was originally creating using a silhouette, the three quarter view was a lot more difficult than I thought it'd be and I definitely see why we would draw the other viewpoints first.

I'm happy with this piece, I thought about adding more clothing than just a belt but felt it didn't fit the story/wouldn't look right.

Visual Design - Animated Sprites

In this task we were given initial images. Using these images and the animation timeline function on Photoshop we then had to add features to these images and create a short animation sequence.

We started with this pig guard, since it was the first piece of animation we had done, the movement layers had been done this us. All we had to do we sort out the layers and put them together correctly on the animation timeline. Making the right layers visible when they're supposed to be. I also added differently colour eyes to create a more fearsome look. These needed to be repositioned throughout the animation.

Pig Guard:

The next images we were given were of this girl (well without the axe and shield). This walk cycle had more frames than the previous animation which meant it became more time consuming. We then had to add something to the animation to make it stand out from the original. For this I decided to equip her with a simple battle axe and shield, which both move in respect to how she does.

Girl:

I found this task quite fun as I've always been interested in animation and have friends that study it. It's definitely an important core of games visually and learning the concept more thoroughly was also enjoyable. I can't wait to use more software to animate and see more possibilities.