Who was the man in the gasmask you were so excited about and why were you taking photos of Pete?

Ahem, yes, well, his name is Marx and he was part of the second half of my project for this semester and Pete was a reference for drawing my orthographical poses. This probably needs further explanation…SO, the second part of my project was looking at the design process – I don’t come from a design background, so even though this may seem elementary to some, but it was learning think in a different way in terms of designing for me. With the first part of the project and the Atombots, I didn’t really develop their designs all that much. Most of them were ‘as drawn’. After writing a list of genres/styles that interest me I settled on a Cyberpunk theme for these characters and did a couple of initial drawings of characters. After talking to Josh about them he suggested taking the gas mask and developing it – spend time drawing out lots of different designs for the gasmask; picking out bits I liked and further developing them.

We also talked about the character being in game and how in a 3rd person style game you would be spending a lot (LOT) of time looking at his back. In a couple of sketches I had suggested there was a backpack of some sort so I then spent time developing the look of it. Even the most throw-away sketches, comments and ideas have a place in this process as they could in themselves become a strong idea or concept or inspire new ideas.

Once I had worked on the designs and pulled them together to create a final ‘concept’ for the character. After that came the photographing of Pete – to whom I am very grateful (thanks Pete). There were basically photos to be used as references for drawing the orthographic outlines for the modelling of Marx in Maya.