Gemma
Burke

TThe idea for this project started last semester in soft body conceptual art project. I knew I wanted to incorporate character design in my final project and I already had the starting stages of that, I had 3 characters designed already, and a small back story so all I had to do was to expand that story and add more characters. With a background of graphic design I knew I wanted to bring that into this project, and that’s where the book idea came from, since I had designed 3 books prior to this. Augmented reality is still in it’s early stages with the likes of Pokémon Go, and I had some experience with it in a previous project. But something that I haven’t seen much of is AR working with print design, there are some examples out there but not too many. The idea for the collectable cards were added after ,in the early concept stages after researching characters and I came across old Pokémon cards. I remember in my childhood having the cards but also the guidebook telling me all about each Pokémon and I wanted that for my characters. Pokémon influenced this project quite a bit, in both character design but also had it’s marketed as a whole.

The current Weirdog characters were male looking and therefore the female demographic was lost. My task was to develop 15-20 more Weirdogs with female qualities. I found the work placement very enjoyable, I treated it like I would any freelance graphic design project I’ve done in the past 5 years. The process of designing a character and the process of designing a wedding invitations (which is what I had done previously) there isn’t much between them. Sketching ideas is important with both and then taking those sketches and developing them further, either more detailed sketches or straight to screen. Getting feedback from the client is also important. Getting their thoughts, ideas and opinions of what I’ve pitched to them. Over the past 9 months of this course, I have really loved concept art.Designing ‘The Critters’ has given me the taste to continue designing more characters in my spare time. Working on Weirdogs has added to that. Hopefully the sketching and digital painting techniques I have learned from this will be used more and more in my future designs .

I decided the way I wanted my character to interact with the ball was something I could do myself and that was soloing (GAA) and this lead to how I was going to rig the character. I decided I wanted to use forward kinematics throughout the whole rig to give myself more control over the entire animation.

The theme I had chosen for this project was ‘Steampunk Styled Object’. The decision to go with this theme influenced by seeing the music video for Panic! At the Disco’s The Ballad of Mona Lisa which steampunk style video. Steampunk a genre of science fiction that has a historical setting and typically features steam-powered machinery rather than advanced technology but I wanted to mix that style with current technology. After much research I had decided on designing a casing for a Raspberry Pi, a small compact PC in the palm of your hand. The design was a mix of typical steampunk elements gears, chains and pipes and I wanted to use wood as the main body of the case. For the outside it looks like an ornate box until the small screen in the centre lights up showing that is connected to wifi. I found getting the orthographic drawings correct quite difficult since I haven’t done them since 1st year of secondary school. But in the end I quickly modelling everything in MAYA and used the renders as a basis to get perspective right.

The them I had chosen for the crate was ‘Game of Thrones’. I am a big fan of the show so deciding on what element of the show to incorporate was difficult. I decided on a theme of weddings within the shows, The Red wedding, the purple wedding and a dothraki wedding. The final crate was based on the Red wedding, with the burnt banner of the Stark house to show that the Frey family burnt the banners of the starks after the wedding.

For this project I chose the ‘The Monster Mash’ brief and within that brief I chose to design 3 cartoon based monsters. I wanted the monster to be cute but also have a dark backstory. The target age group for this project was tweens the late teens, since the cute design of the characters would appeal to the younger audience but the backstory would appeal to the older audience. I really enjoy the freedom of this concept art brief it let my imagination roam free and I realised that my imagination had a dark underbelly. The story behind the Hoodchie was that they hunt and kill their prey and use the skin of the animal to make themselves armour and them would do this by sewing parts of the skin together to fit their body. The Bullibuns are the protectors of the animals and they will do anything to protect the animals from the Hoodchies. This backstory was fleshed out more with the major project , but the basis was designed for this project.

With this project I wanted to design two contrasting robots. From researching I found that the 1970’s Iron was very different compared the Iron Man shown to today’s marvels films. My aim to design the 1970’s to look as crap as possible compared to the modern day Iron Man. I replaced the arc reactor with a light bulb and sellotape and the texture of the entire robot was made to look like a bin bag. I wanted the modern Iron Man to look shiny and brand new so when adding the textures in MAYA, I used a specular map to highlight the shininess of the iron.

I realised right away that when unwrapping the robot and creating UV maps that I hadn’t placed all the UVs on one map, so I had go through the process of baking the lightning and textures into one map. Creating the marker my idea behind it was he was running a campaign for some sort of political office and this was the poster.

This was first project that Mudbox was used and I enjoyed the freedom of painting texture into a model and adding colour using the graphics tablet was also a nice change. The texture and colour of the alien came from researching aliens and seeing what other people had concepted aliens to look like. Mu influence came from the aliens used in the sims 4 and the marking that you can put on them using makeup and the colour was a mixture of the skin colour choices you have.

To be honest I am not happy on how the final model turned out, I found it difficult to get my head around the idea of topology. The model to me looks to boxy for my liking but at a first attempt at modelling a full model from concept to finish it isn’t the worst. The part of this project that I enjoyed to most was the texturing in Mudbox and photoshop. I learned what not to do in this project and took that knowledge with me when modelling the characters in the final project.

I wanted to design a robot that had a comedy element to it and also look like it was cobbled together using different parts of machines and other robots. Adding the fish made of nuts and bolts and giving the helmet a transparent textures really added to the robots finish, and it also looks like the fish in the brain of the robot. I was influenced alot by Eric Cartman's robot custom in south park ‘Awesom-O’ and hence why the music in the video is the awesome-o song that Butters’ sings.
The organic model design came from the soft body conceptual art project since I was modelling the Hoodchie and the Bullibun concept art where already there.
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