Initial sketches

After the research i decided that was the end of it and it time to begin concepting the characters and beginning the build of them, these are the initial thumbnails of the characters, i fins this was of working very strange but i gave it a go none the less.

Piercings & Tattoos

From looking into piercings, their placements and styles (and also having a few myself) besides the ring or bar they dont really tend to distort the body overly unless they are streched, such as ears and lips, this is where a gauge (thickness) of bar is increased over time to strech the piercing.

Tattoos:

Styles:

Tattoos are a very personal thing, most are completely unique and either drawn by the customer or are designed by an experienced tattoo artist, the one to the left is a baby koi fish i designed and had tattooed on my left shoulderblade, this photo was taken just as it was being finished (hence the blood), this tattoo is not 2 and a half years old and has not really changed in its design or colours, its standing up pretty well, its difficult to actually research tattoos untill i had an idea what i wanted my characters personalities to be like, there tattoos had to fit their personalities and style choices.

one of the things i knew was that they were going to be a couple that had been together through some ammount of hardship and would probably commemorate that with a tattoo of some kind so a match ing tattoo would obviously play a part with these two.

with the woman i wanted her tattoos to still show a certain ammont of femmininity and she may not be covered in them, this lack of tattoo coverage may also play part with the male he may only have a sleeve on one arm, it has yet to really be looked at.

tattoos bleed outwards after about ten years and so slightly blurry, or at least they used to, inks have come such a way that extremely desne thick inks exist that take longer to heal admittedly but done actually tend to face and bleed out all that much.

so many diffrent styles of tattoos exist nowadays, from the popular japanese styles and old school roses and daggers to tribal symbols, black and white, colour, lettering and names. instead of trying to explain all these diffrent styles i desided to create some mood boards and use sites such as tumblur and pintrest to have a look for interesting designs. none of the following photos belong to me.

Link to my pinterest:  http://pinterest.com/hevencide/tattoos/

Links to tublurs/pintrest boards i have looked through: http://fuckyeahgirlswithtattoos.tumblr.com/

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/tattoos
http://pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=tattoo
http://pinterest.com/jillymkev/tattoo/
http://pinterest.com/calla199/tattoo-s/
http://pinterest.com/silvichan/tattoo/
http://pinterest.com/tonewalk/tattoo-s/
http://pinterest.com/paegonzales/tattoo/

Research 2

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After looking at the websites that my friend reccomended that i did i found some interesting styles and pattersn, websites such as iorn fist where extremly interesting as they have things called "look books" which are a series of photos of models completely done up in the clothing.

Iorn fist in particular was helpfull as they fetaured allot of mens clothing aswell as female, in the look book and on the website, its given me a better variety for the male character and actually given me a better basis for design than just the origonal styles of elvis and jhonny cash which where very similar and bland, rockabilly men in the modern age tend to be allot more eccentric and care more about their appearence.

These are a series of images taken from iorn fists look books, they will serve as part of a kind of mood board i do not own these images they are taken from http://www.ironfist.co.uk/lookbook:

The clothes are a more eccentric from iron fist usig the origional rockabilly styling and putting their own modern twist upon it, its a very popular brand of clothing for the alternative culture i have been looking into and is still revelant, i may use some of the more eccentric styles in the male to make him stand out more and not be overshadowed by the woman who in this sub culture are the more predominant steriotype.

Pinupgirlclothing.com have taken a more traditional look upon the rockabily style keeping to its origional style staples and tailoring it more towards "curvy" more voluptuous women, the mens clothing is very sparse and adheres to the problems i was having previously of the clothing being too simple and similar to make an individual character. the following images are owned by pinupgirlclothing.com and are bing used like the iron fist ones for mood board refference.

the mens clothing seen here http://www.pinupgirlclothing.com/vintage-style-inspired-clothing/giftsforguys.html is a good example of the traditional rockabily style, showing aswell how limited it is.

womens can be seen here: http://www.pinupgirlclothing.com/vintage-style-inspired-clothing/retrodresses.html

the website has protection on the images, not allowing them to be taken off the website, so i havent incase it causes a rection from them, but if you look on the womes the clothing is very figure hugging and is usualy teamed the the lingere to create this hour glass figure which is the desitred shape of a woman who wears this style of clothing, the clothing has a nice vintage feel to it and is revelaing without actually being revealing focusing more on a slight bit of cleavage and figure hugging, rater than little clothing, its what is considered a more classy way of dressing pin up.

Soho as i found out is just a sort of department store which stocks the other brands such as hell bunny and banned, banned dont really have much on tehir website as you have to become a member with a fee as far as i know, im not willing to pay it so i looked at them through attitudeclothing.com and soho.com.

Banned and hellbunny only clothing for women and the clothing features allot of casual wearable designs for everyday use featuring allot of polka dot and leapoard print.

above: banned clothing
below: hell bunny

 

research 1

I decided to begin with the female characters research.

I am quite lucky to have female friends that adhere to the style and fashions that i am researching, they allowed me to look at their tattoo's closely, they showed me clothing that they wear that they themselves would consider steriotypically "Pin up/Rockabilly". i dont however know how they would feel about photographs of their clothes and body art, piercings etc being posted up in a blog which is why no visual research is included here. i notiched while talking to them and being given the help they did that a few similarities that they joke about started to become more apparent:

•  the girls all had dyed hair in one shape or another, Carys has brown hair with flashes of green intertwining through out it, ashleigh changes her hair quite oftern but at the time was sporting lilac and pink hair, Sarah D had an underlayer of purple fading into pink, Sarah H has bleached flashes in her hair that she changes as she pleases at the time it was turquoise, red, pink, blue, green and purple, Nicci has platinum blonde hair with a few flashes of blue on one side and Emma dyes her blonde hair black and is the most steriotypical Pin up girl (which is not an insult she dosent mind people saying it) she stands out as she has the Betty page style fringe and usually wears fire red lipstick.

• the eye makeup stands out quite allot, most of the time (because all the time is incorrect every girl has their lazy days) the girls wear dark eye makeup, some wear the winged eye make up done with pencil or liquid, some wear just khol eyepencil that they smudge to do the smokey rock look and one or two like to change it up with a bit of coloured eyeliner.

• the prints on the clothing were quite a stand out, my friends are deffinately not afreaid of colour, polka dots, love hearts, check or plaid, stripes and Kistch style prints (owls, swallows, tattoo prints) all the clothes my friends wear all give the illusion of a curvy frame, ashleigh who is naturally slim tends to wear high waisted skirts and simple tops tucked in to accentuate and make the most of her shape, the curvy hourglas shape seems to be a popular style choice in the fashion scene as most underwear my friends speak about and call "staples" give the illusion of a tiny waist and well formed hips.

• the hair accessorys seem to all keep allot of similarities bandannas and hair peices seem to be the most common, my friends mostly have a nose piercing there bottom lobes and top eat and mone of two have dabbled in septum piercings and lip piercings but no longer have them except Emma who has a monroe piercing (top lip tot he side to give the illusion ofmaralin monroes beauty spot) 

The girls then gave me a list of clothing brands to look into that specilise in this style of clothing acessory and footwear to look at:

• Iorn fist
• Hell bunny
• Pinupgirlclothing.com
•  Soho
• Banned

I still need to speak to my friend who is a tattoo artist (or even bug my own when i am next under the needle) to find out how tattoos age and react on the skin so the ones on my models wont look like stamps. 

After Speaking to my Tutor

I spoke to my tutor during my lesson after i had my initial ideas about the burlesque bar and soon realised my scope was incredibly off. so we took a step back to see what i was actually interested in, what got me passionate about being in the industry and what i found the most interesting. from this i soon realised my real interest lied in character design and modelling, stemming from a past specialisation of anatomical illustration and an old ambition to be a medical illustrator, as well as a love of fashion and hair, being the big girly girl i am.

From this i went away and researched different company's job vacancies to see what the industry wanted from their character artists and modellers to give me a better idea of what to aim for.

with the timescales i have within my 3rd year i decided to do a male and female character clothed and unclothed (in underwear) on a turntable as my honours project. still keeping to the 1950's burlesque theme i decided that they would both be "rockabilly" style characters that would fit into a rock and roll style game.

my next consideration was the poly count, i didn't want to be too generous with them as it needed to be a realistic amount but i also didn't want them to be as low poly as the team fortress models as i wanted to be able to make them more realistic than cartoon, and i also wanted to incorporate the use of mudbox into the project to make the textures really something of high quality.

I ended up settling on about 6000 polys per character, including clothing.

i will now begin to concept character thumbnails and decide if i want the man and women to be a generic body type, at the moment i am leaning more towards the woman being a size UK 16 and the male a fat biker, this is only an idea at the moment however.

Initial Thought Process & Ideas

**This blog is a complete ramble, it is just a way for me to get my head clear and ideas down somewhere so i can organise them better, just a quick warning!** 

For my honours project i definitely want to focus on 3d modelling and character design. originally i was going to concept and build a town with people, environments and props, set in a Caribbean hidden village that's town was built around 4 pillars that contained each of 4 elements, earth, water, wind and fire. however after reviewing my timescales and the work involved i now see that my scope was horrendously off. it also was gearing up to be very similar to the island of Besaid from Final Fantasy X, this is also not what I want.

I was going to stay along the same lines however and took into account the other modules to help me think more clearly about my Honours. I want my three projects this year to be significantly different from each other to allow me to learn as much as possible as well as creating a nice varied professional portfolio. The whimsical fantasy style has been used in my XB3001 so is therefore as far as I am concerned not even worth thinking about, its covered. I started to look into my own interests outside of university and games, trying to think of books i like, movies, paintings anything really that might spark something interesting that will allow me to get everything i can out of my final year in university and enjoy it at the same time.

I have started to look into a fashion style I adore, that of the 1950's Rockabilly style and how it has translated into today's Rockabilly style subculture closely matched within this subculture is the dance style of Burlesque, something else i have an interest in. My main goal within this project is to fine tune my character creation and environment design. I believe that this particular style allows me the freedom to try out new things that i have yet to play with, such as how piercings would be modelled onto characters, how tattoos would be textured on as to not look fake and look correct on the skin, allowing to play with dyed and natural hair in different styles, more curvaceous women and more filled out men to the more toned slender figures as Burlesque allows people of all body shapes and sizes to perform and the bars usually cater to all preferences of dancer. the decor and style of the time as well also allow allot of fun with the modelling as its all decadent and brightly coloured. the character creation side of it would also allow for allot of creativity as each dancer has there own persona they bring to the stage that plays a massive role in their performance.

In the same vein I think my best bet will be to sketch out some initial ideas to maybe a burlesque bar environment that maybe stretches over 3 floors, like a nightclub, probably will look into Circo in Liverpool or The Crazy House also in Liverpool. I think this might be best to try out just to get my head in the correct frame before making my project plans skeleton. More research is definitely needed, not so much on the style as i know quite a bit to begin with, but more into the architecture and maybe how certain things would work within the game engine UDK.

Ramble over.