Creative Portfolio Development

Creature Design Progress After just chipping away and making multiple changes to my character design, I feel like I am getting somewhere closer to the alien design I am after. I started blocking in some rough anatomy to help bring together the realism of the character, and started playing around with what sort of armour/exo-suite I want my character to have.  

Hard Surface Armour Test Due to some Yoshimitsu designs having armour and helmet pieces, I decided to experiment with adding interesting armour shapes for the head and practise some hard surface modelling in ZBrush. As I am still in the concept stage for my character, I just added geometry onto my existing sculpts in rough chunks, mainly using the extract feature in ZBrush from masked areas, and then cut sharp edges using clip brushes and smoothing it down with a mixture of the hPolish and Trim Dynamic brushes. A combination of these gave quite a decent hard look straight away, without the need of using any retopology or box modelling techniques, which saves me a lot of time throughout concepting. 

Creature Iterations  In order to get to a design that I am happy with, I will just keep changing, adjusting and improving the concept sculpts until I get a form that feels right and fits in with the style that I am aiming towards. It can be daunting at times as there is just too much freedom and creative rein, so I have tried to not alter the main form drastically as otherwise I will just keep starting from scratch. Instead I have tried to keep aspects of designs I've liked from previous design iterations and just combined them to future concepts, as well as gathering lots of inspiration of forms from extensive reference.  I don't want my final design to just replicate an existing character so I am trying to not just take features from other's work, and instead let them lead me to more interesting shapes that will make my character look better.

Roughing Out A Yoshimitsu Style Design After setting myself the brief of using Yoshimitsu to inspire my design and keep me on track to creating something alien and unique, I started using loads of reference of similar alien/creature concepts to help guide my character's look. I used Artstation a lot to add peoples artwork to a collection so that I could have loads of designs that inspired me and were related to what I wanted to create all in one place, and that I could easily add to on the fly. Other game art such as Doom, Halo and Warframe also helped give me some good concepting reference to use as I went along. Below are the initial concept sculpts where I was aiming towards a good silhouette and look of a believable Yoshimitsu style alien. 

Change Of Design After concept sculpting from random images of existing creatures, I decided to set myself more of a brief in order to have something to push me and help aid my design, so that I could gather better reference and keep on track. I decided to base my creature sculpt on Yoshimitsu from Tekken as he is a character that I have always been fond of, and his design also changes in every iteration of the game. For this reason, I decided to set myself the task of creating a new Yoshimitsu, as if I was designing the next version of him for the game.  By setting this brief, I aim to keep myself motivated and hopefully stop myself from constantly changing my idea, so that I can move onto creating a final piece on time.  Below are some images of the variations of the Yoshimitsu character. I will not be using only these images as reference, but will expand my reference search to other similar character designs that include a creature/alien in a costume/exo-...

Paint Overs After creating a few designs in ZBrush, I decided to take a couple that I thought stuck out the most and do some paint overs in Photoshop, just to get a quick idea of colour and what the creatures could end up living like. After looking back over my designs I still knew that there was a lot of concepting required still to get a result that I would be happy with developing.

Concept Sculpts Here are some beginning concept blockouts I made for visualisation and to brainstorm forms to get an idea of what I did and didn't want from my creature design. I tried keeping these concepts quick and without putting too much detail in at the start so that it was easier to bin the ideas without being too invested in them. At this point I was just interested in getting the good ideas out by experimentation.

Initial Ideas My first thought for CPD was to create a creature in ZBrush to improve my organic sculpting, and learn some new techniques. For some first concepts, I gathered a load of reference of insects and animals to get some forms to work from and inspire me.