Character Design: Lectures

29/08/2022 - 26/09/2022 (Week 1 - Week 5)
Evaleez Voo Lian Yun / 0350275
Design Research Dissertation/ Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
Task 1: Personification

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Identify Key Visuals Ideas

Resarch and Discovery

• From your compiled visual references, identify the more prominent, unique and interesting visuals that best resemble your theme
• You may not use all of them, but these are good ways to utilize your references and keep your ideas within the set parameters.

Character's Key Traits

• List down your character’s traits. 
• Key traits like gender, age, species, class profession and physical build is a good starting point to keep your design grounded.

Thumbnail Sketches

• Very rough sketches outlining the general anatomy and proportions of your character. 
• Usually done in one tone of colour with different values and lines for added depths and details.

Fig 1.0 Thumbnail Sketch Examples

Shape

• You can associate shapes to the characteristic traits listed. 
• Start with the basic structure of the suitable shapes i.e: rectangle for tanky character, round shapes for babies, and then continue to develop further from here with more combinations of shapes.

Fig 1.1 Shape Studies

Gestures

• A gesture drawing is usually a quick, often simple drawing that captures the essential feeling, energy, movement, action, or pose of the subject.
• Contains a minimum amount of information (line, tone, markings) to achieve the maximum results of the essence of the subject.
• Can be realistic, but not always.

Fig 1.2 Gesture Studies

Costume Design

Design Process

Start by studying the narrative. Stories will reveal 4 important details for this process:

• Characters (Who are your characters?)
• Actions that will occur overtime (What happens?)
• Time period (When it takes place?)
• Location (Where the story is happening?)

Other details you may need to pay attention to:

• Special particulars/specifics about your characters
• Mood of the narrative
• Color palettes

Good costume design requires research. This may include research on: 

• Internet and at archives
• Museums and libraries
• Studying historical and contemporary visual references

Skins/ Mods

• Transmog. Transmute. Glam. Skins. Mods. 
• These are the usual go to terms to define cosmetics add-ons that has no additional advantage to game play. 
• But they allows players to change the appearances of the playable characters.

Detailing

• Creating costumes digitally may leave the garments to seem unused or unrealistically worn out
• Adding wear, distressing and manipulating materials is one of the basic skills of a concept designer
• Aesthetic details like patches, large stitching, patterns, gilded borders, jewelry accentuates the attire
• Cloth’s movements communicate the attributes of materials, add interest

Outfit Sheet Examples

Fig 1.3 Outfit Sheet Sample 1

Fig 1.4 Outfit Sheet Sample 2

Fig 1.5 Outfit Sheet Sample 3

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Reflection

Although most of our Monday classes landed on public holidays, I learned a lot from this module. Some of the more memorable finding is how ooutfits can showcase the economic class of a character. For example, the outfit worn by a noble would looks very different from an outfit worn by common folk.

I appreaciate the flexibilty in this module whereby we are allowed to create characters on our own chosen universe. This allowed us to openly explore the our own imagination and visualising them.