Dude... concept

Usually I don't name my characters, but it only seemed fitting to name my first game character something catchy and exotic, like... George or something.  After about 2 days, I had to save my file/project as something, so I just went with "Dude".  There were plans on changing it later... but it stuck, and since then Dude has been the subject of quite a few experiments.

I had to start somewhere so I pulled in a few existing body parts, cut them up, and arranged them in a typical T-pose.  Nothing hectic, but it's always better than staring at an intimidating blank canvas.  Here I sort out the proportions of the character, which will differ on the character and style of it.  This is basically just placing the parts at key points, head, hands, feet and belly button.  The size of the head in relation to the body is always a good way to give the character size.  With the head just a tad smaller than the 7 and 1/2 head rule, the character appears a bit bulkier.

Cool, with that done... You would think to quickly take a screen grab of the body into Photoshop, and starting painting some serious armor.  But nope, not me... who needs concept work!! I spent like 3 weeks trying to model armor on the body without any concept work, by looking at a crapload of images in my library.  Modeling  different pieces from different images, and although I built quite an extensive library of armor pieces; Dude looked like a clown, and I had trouble going into public with patches of hair missing.

Lesson learnt. Print screen. Paste Photoshop. Feng Zhu.  I watched a few cool character tutorial dvd's by Feng Zhu(Designing fighting robots).  Back to design principles, started with original shapes, check silhouette.  Apply rule of three's. Major shape, Smaller shapes, detail shapes.

I started with a few rough shapes, playing around, but what usually happens when I draw characters is that I automatically go into "character mode", and I start drawing anatomy.  So the armor for Dude is basically an ergonomic extension of the human form, worn externally to protect every muscle... plate by plate.  Or as I like to call it... "Need to do research on Robots". 

On a technical note, I painted one side of the armor, and mirrored it over to the other side.  The character needed to be able to move in the armor, and there still wasn't any restriction on the animations, so he needed to be able to do any range of movements. I kept the shoulders open, to not have to worry about armor articulation, no armor on the stomach region, this is for deformation and silhouette purposes, to give the proper V-shape. The overall shape of the body in relative normal proportions. For normal/diffuse/occlusion map generation I needed to keep the details of the armor to still keep the shape of the "whole", as I will need to build the low poly mesh cage to project the details on.  Even though this is still the concept stage, it will save a lot of time and problem solving later on to just think about it when designing.