Prototype Class : The Fembot

Meet the fembot, in fact, meet lots of fembots. There can only actually be one fembot, so these gals are going to have to battle it out to the death and the victor will be in our game. Or not. Depending on whether I decide to make more fembots just to grind their gears. And I will make more, oh how I will make. Make more that is. Because I need to. This char is still in production.

During her production, the fembot was actually supposed to be a manbot, unfortunately, the production line exhausted their supply of male personality cores, so old fembot here had to be fitted with a female personality core. Meaning, she has a very butch, macho physique in juxtaposition with a chewing gum walk and a tendency to find small children so adorable she’d want to crush their faces with love.

To start out, I created a reference sheet of physiques and shapes I envisioned the female to have. This means huge, heavy, bulky and and any other synonym of ‘big’. Reference for the first two images and the first on the bottom row are all the works of the marvellous CreatureBox the images include: Inhabitants, RustBucket and Rose and The Boiler. The rad Red Robots Redemption is made by Roberto Roberts, followed by Rosie the Robot by MurderousAutomaton. Finally, the lower row includes Atlas from Portal 2 and Drill Sergeant from Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure.

After this step I began making some silhouettes for the body shape. Though I feel it’s fairly obvious, I used reference from a lot of zombies. And I mean a lot. So many you could class them as a horde and there would still be some left over. Three. The team picked 3 and 5 as their favourite body types. And rightly so. From here I sketched out a few thumbnails for robots using the desired body types as a reference. Ugh, these sketches look horrible. Pretend you didn’t see them. Or better still, remove your eyes and reinsert them in 6 to 19 hours when the thought of these concepts are just a distant memory. But that would mean you’ve remembered them. Damn it, you!

So then I just did this. Yeah, that happened. These are three concepts which I didn’t like enough to take further. Two did beg me to carry on. It was kind of endearing really. But not nearly endearing enough. Goodbye two, we had a good run.

For unobvious reasons, we’re going to call this chick Screeny Facey. Admire that penmanship. She doesn’t. She’s very hostile. Probably because of all those times I changed her channel over to BBC2 instead of actually listening to what she had to say (which is never anything of importance or interest).

After unplugging Screeny Facey (she kept chirping on about some fire in my house, I didn’t know what she meant), I got cracking with this little number. Or big number. Number 8 to be precise. She really is brawns over brains, and looks, and also over social etiquette. I put my Copics to the test once more and this time I added an extra touch by whipping out my Prisma-Colour pencil crayons and used the white pencil to add highlights. You can’t even tell I did that.

Goodness! There’s a fire in my house!

After destroying the fire I went back to the thumbnailing process. I love this part. I could do this part forever. Or until I get bored and I just do something else instead. The team like 6, 10 and 18, which is the first time we’ve agreed on anything, ever. I get a bad feeling about this.

For this section I bring up a blank canvas and essentially just lay down shapes until I find a set that I see a character in. I advanced each character through three stages (apart from 7-12 which was a six stage process). This section requires a lot of Free Transform and Horizontal Flip.

This is 6. Say hello 6. “Hello 6!” Oh aren’t you just the wittiest, 6. My shading is improving.

 

Since this is a female character, she needs to look at least some part feminine. Maybe a corset was too much. Maybe making the corset out of road signs was too little. I don’t know where that balance is.

 

So instead of using UK road signs, I was told to make it more sci-fi. This is my idea of sci-fi. The colours are nice here, but I worry they’d blend too much with our sandy background. But that didn’t stop be concepting another orange character, no sir.

 

Robot in a tutu.

Robot Cowboys vs Robot Indians

With the second year of university well and truly behind me, the journey into third year commences. I like to call it 2.5 year, but it doesn’t seem to be catching on. The task for us now is to get a hefty start on our third year game. And boy are we started! By which I mean yes. We are. Started that is.

There have been a tonne of ideas floating around, and some great ones to boot. We finally settled on an idea, which, in the simplest way possible, is Cowboys vs Indians. But not just any cowboys, oh no sir, it’s a coalition of robots and cowboys. Cowbots. Roboys. I don’t know, sleep on it.

As Lead Artist and Character/Prop Artist for the team (Studio 42) I’ve been scribbling away at some character designs this week and I’m pretty happy with where this is going. But there is a massive tear in my heart as to whether I want to get serious with this or adorable. Here are a few designs to tease your wanting eyes.

The guy below, he’s a Sheriff. But I don’t need to tell you that. You noticed his badge, right? I love the idea of having a very top heavy character with a skinny waist and legs. So that’s what this is. I guess, if anything, this guy looks like a ranger. He’d be right at home gracefully wielding a sniper rifle, casually knocking your block off while you obliviously think that that slight whistling in the wind was natures song, when in actuality it was a .50 caliber bullet racing towards you at 2,200fps with your death certificate. Now you’re dead. At least you won’t be making that mistake again.

You don’t want to mess with this guy. I mean, seirously, I messed with this guy once and now I’m bound for eternity to sing Carly Rae Jepson’s Call Me Maybe until people’s heads explode. And you’ll be surprised to find how easy the transition from intact to brains-on-the-wall is. But you don’t have to ever worry about that anymore. I trapped this guy on paper. Here he is. Laugh at him. Go on, he deserves it. It would be ridiculous to think that his production number ‘1337’ has anything to do with any sort of lame gaming reference, and it couldn’t be that in some crazy, upside-down world, it is completely a coincidence. Nope, I didn’t think you’d buy that either.

As precious and as innocent as this little deviant looks, don’t be fooled by her appearance. Or do. That is what she wants after all. And she’s going to kill me if I knock her reputation. She may not be the sharpest bot in the assembly line, but who needs smarts when you’ve got a body like that? Though you may not think it, there’s a whole plethora of weapons stashed under that skimpy little shirt and behind those slick pleather chaps. Unthinkable, unimaginable, unspeakable weapons. Mainly repeaters I think.

This little lady doesn’t like to leave anything to the imagination. Well, not your imagination. She left it all to my imagination. Look at her, bursting with creativity and tattybojangles.

Whatever could one do with four arms, you ask? I’ll tell you. You could peel two bananas at once.  You could point in four different directions. Or even the same direction. You could crawl on all sixes. The possibilities are endless. This guy doesn’t use his arms to their full potential. Their purpose is nothing exciting, like those stated above, in fact, it’s actually kind of boring and sensible. He uses the lower two to control his robot horse while he upper set man the crossbow. What a waste of a perfectly good appendix.

Week 01: Motionless Knight

University Level 2 is now 100% complete, which means I have ~four months off to prepare myself for my third and final year. I’m going to use this time to fully learn ZBrush/Sculptris, Maya, Mudbox, digital painting, cat rig and various other software/techniques which will be useful for my third year project.

To do so, myself an a few friends from university (Ali Malik, Ryan Bradley and Thomas Turner) have decided to set ourselves weekly design challenges where we must fully design, model and texture a character (rigging and animating is optional). The challenge started yesterday where we used a random theme generator (http://www.3dfantasyart.co.uk/arttheme.html) which concluded with the theme Motionless Knight . 

For the idea I had it was inspired by The Witcher 2 cinematic trailer, where the crewmen on the ship are frozen. I was then reminded of The Snow Queen, and I merged the two styles together and came up with a Snow Queen’s knight who had been frozen in ice for thousands of years.

Here’s a quick concept for the character. I’m extremely worried about modelling it as I haven’t touched the female anatomy in modelling before and I can see the breasts being a bugger to get right.

The helm was inspired by this awesome drawing by Ryan Toroni.

Day 15 : My Left Hand

This is my hand. My left hand. Here’s what it looks like.

Day 10 : The Leap of Faith

Reference

Day 7 : The Respiratory System

The respiratory system controls and regulates breathing. The lungs are subconscious muscles which works constantly, however, we do have direct control over the lungs through conscious thought.  The purpose of the lungs is to bring oxygen into the body. The oxygen is received by the blood and oxygenated. The oxygenated blood is transported around the body via the intrinsic vein system and back to the heart, to be oxygenated again. This cycle continues infinitely. When we exercise, or fuelled with adrenalin, or generally ‘out of breath’ our lungs and heart work faster in order to pump oxygenated blood around the body faster as the body needs it quicker in order to function.

The lungs are composed of the bronchus, alveoli and bronchiole. Oxygen travels past the mouth, down the trachea and into the two lungs. The muscles of the lung draw the contraction of the diaphragm. When oxygen is inhaled the diaphragm extends and upon exhaling it reduces. The little air sacks within the lungs, the alveoli, take in the oxygen. There are over 700 million of them. The bronchus and bronchiole are the tiny tubes and pipes within the lungs that allow oxygen to travel there.

The two female figure studies are taken from reference from ArtsyPoses. Image_01, Image_02.

 

Day 6 : Integumentary System

The integumentary system includes the skin, hair, nails and sweat glands. Not only does the skin protect the inner body, it also acts as a massively intrinsic defence system.  Skin is very tough, its thickness ranging somewhere between 1-3mm (its thickness increasing around the souls of the feet, palms of the hands and back).

Skin is constructed of three main layers, all of which can be further broken down. The outer layer, the epidermis, is a sheet of skin which is constantly replenishing itself. Beneath the epidermis is the dermis. The dermis is a thick wall which provides skin with a lot of its elasticity. Finally, the innermost layer is the hypodermis which contains the fat tissue. The body uses fat as its food source. Though our daily food intake supplies us with our daily energy source, the fat reserves are kept as an emergency food source to provide energy when it isn’t being provided by carbohydrates. Fat also has secondary functions, such as protecting the body from cold and reduce shock from impact.

The fats builds up in different areas between men and women. Men primarily gain weight around their mid-drift, while within women it’s more prominent around the thighs and buttocks.

The bodies temperature is controlled by sweat glands within the skin. When the body is too hot it will produce sweat in order to cool down. The main sweat glands are found in the arm pits, around the groin and behind the knee.

The loose study in charcoal is based on William Bouguereau La Vague. Bouguereau is a renaissance artist whose portraits primarily depict fuller figured women. This shape is reflective of that period and evidence that the female form initially gathers fat cells around the hips and thighs.