Inspiration

Just some inspiration for my character design for MDDN243.  I really liked the aesthetics of the Gogolithic Mass from Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP.  I also liked how in Spirited Away the river spirit come to the bath house and is a giant mass of mud after the trash is removed from his body it is revealed that he is the river spirit.  The last image is a still from a music video called Bronte, I just really like the aesthetic of the bison.

Jen Zee - Bastion

Jen Zee is the artist at Supergiant games, the independent studio which made the game Bastion for xbox live and later ported to the PC through mostly digital distribution.  Zee hand-painted all of the landscapes in the game which defined the look of the game.

Bastion is game set in the aftermath of the Calamity, an event which fractured the city of Caelondia as well as near by areas of the world into multiple floating pieces and turned the most of the population to ash.  The narrative follows the story of the Kid as he makes his way to the Bastion, a safe place where the people of Cealondia can retreat to in an emergency, and his attempts to repair the Bastion with cores that once powered the city, and discover what actually caused the Calamity.

The entire game is narrated by an old man which the Kid meets once he reaches the Bastion named Rucks, who is apparently the designer of the Bastion and seems to be the only other native of the city who survived, on his journey the Kid finds two more survivors both of Ursa descent who join them at the Bastion.

The gameplay focus on completing levels to upgrade the Bastion and unlock more weapons and perks to make it possible to approach levels in multiple different ways depending on your load-out.  Bastion focuses on combat with both melee and range weapons, and each weapon has history which tells the player about the faction that used the weapon.  

The aesthetic look of the game contains hand painted landscapes and characters which, while not hand painted, look right at home in the lush landscape.

Links

http://supergiantgames.com/

http://jenzeejunk.blogspot.co.nz/

All Photo courtesy of supergiantgames.com

Blocking part 1

Have done the first lot of blocking for the animation, mostly to do with the waking of the robot after it has recharged.  Have noticed a few things that are annoying about the rig, but most of the problems turned out to be from me setting keys on the wrong control groups(such as the one the controls the orientation of the finger controls).  I believe I can have most of the blocking done by at latest Tuesday hopefully giving me enough time to clean up before Friday.  Still need to make the meshes for the environment have done some but have not put them together yet and figured out their orientation in the scene hopefully will have this done by Tuesday as well.

Strike a Pose

Here is what I achieved today.  I finished the rig and now my robot can move.  Only thing not done is the wheel but I will figure it out and do later in the week.

Almost rigged!

The character is almost rigged just the eyes and the eyebrows to go and some polishing on some of the controls to make them easier to use and select.

Learning rigging

The last few days I have been watching a lot of videos on rigging.  One site that I fund quite useful was Poly face.  It has an entire collection of videos on rigging characters for free.  The ones I found useful for this project where the hand and arm tutorials and the mech rig also gave me ideas on how to rig the arm of my character, though I have yet to do that and time is running short.  I plan to spend a good portion of the weekend at Te Aro rigging and starting blocking for the main shots of the animation.

Character Model

I have fixed up a few things on the model mostly to do with edge hardness.  Now that this is done I am going to look up some tutorials on piston IK to make the arms work as I want them to and also some tutorials on hand rigging.