Character Design - Task 1: Personification

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25.04.2024 - 16.05.2024 / Week 01 - Week 04
Ilhan Rayan bin Khairul Anwar / 0361205
Character Design / Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media
Task 1 - Personification

LECTURES 


INSTRUCTIONS


PRACTICAL
The main project for this module is to create an original character design for the video game Genshin Impact. As someone who has played this game since it first came out, I am quite familiar with it and have already had many ideas about original characters, but I have never had the time to truly flesh them out. For Task 1, we had to start by creating and coming up with the concepts for our character.

I decided to make my character be an Eremite commando and respected warrior inspired by the Fremen from the Dune series as I was obsessed with the franchise at the time. From there I started collecting reference photos for what I wanted to have in my character's design.

Figure 1.1: Character References

I also wanted for my character to have some connections to one of our world's Egyptian gods as the other major Sumeru desert characters draw inspiration from them. Cyno represents Anubis, Dehya represents Sekhmet, Sethos represents Set, and Candace represents Thoth. I decided to go with Sobek for my inspriation as he's Egyptian god of crocodiles and death.

I chose to go with a Geo vision for my character as there surprisingly isn't a Sumeru character with a Geo vision despite it being such an obvious choice as Geo is meant to represent "earth" or "stone" which the desert of Sumeru is filled with. As for his name, I went with Zarrark which is meant to be a combination of "Zarrar," which means bravery, fearlessness, valor, and "Sobek" which is the god I'm drawing inspiration from.

Figure 1.2: Location Reference



Figure 1.3: Sumeru Character Silhouettes

To help me try and get a better understanding of how to design the Sumeru characters, I selected four of them and turned them into silhouettes so I could see what their basic shapes were. I noticed that they were primarily angular and sharp in design with Candace being the exception. I added in Alhaitham to my selection as he is primarily a fully clothed character which I wanted to have with my character in order to try and mimic the stillsuits that the Fremen wore in Dune. Though I did understand that these characters are often have a lot of skin showing due to the heat.

Once I had a general understanding, I started off by creating eight simple sketches for what I could do.

Figure 2.1: Thumbnail Sketches

The top four were meant to represent four main principles that I had in mind which were: Sumeru Design, Fremen Design, Armored Design, and Eremite Design. The bottom row were attempts at combining them together in different ways to see what worked. 

Figure 2.2: Progressive Sketches

I was toying around with the wrapping ideas for my character as I thought that it looked nice and provided a unqiue texture style to my character, but I decided to go for a crocodile-print style for when I move onto the finer details and colouring stage of this module. As seen with the third sketch, I tried to create a helmet design that mimiced the helmet that Sobek wears however I struggled to create a design that fit with the character's sleek and smooth aesthetic while also not making him a clone of Cyno, so I ultimately decided to not go with the idea.

Once I had a strong idea down, I moved onto designing the full turnaround for my character which was going to be a challenge for me, especially the side view as I've never done this kind of work before.

Figure 2.3: Final Turnaround

The full compilation of this process can also be found in the Google Slides below.
Figure 3.1: Google Slide 

FEEDBACK

Week 2:
The ideas are really good but try and expand on the armor designs as those could be very interesting, also try to make the helmet less like Cyno's.

REFLECTION

I really enjoyed this task as I got to finally practice and work on my drawing skills which were lackluster to say the least, I understood the basics but I struggled with creating my own design from scratch so being able to practice with this Task was great. I really enjoyed the ideation process which is the area that I want to specialise in for my career as I love coming up with ideas as well as world building and creating characters. However I do believe that my work could have been way better had I not slacked off for most of the time we were given to complete this task, I definitely could have added in more elements to make his design pop out more and feel more alive. I only have myself to blame as I didn't spend enough time on this area. 

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