Animal Logic Academy: Xploro 
My time on the Xploro project was primarily spent in the concept art team.

 

Character Design:

I enjoyed character design the most by far. I do this outside of Masters in my free time quite happily and I feel most at home doing this.

I started my approach by seeing what the other character designers on the concept team would be doing, and decided to fill the gaps and work on the Gods since others were working primarily on the champions.

I wanted to start the process by working on thumbnails and silhouettes, which I asked Chloe Barson (a fellow student) for some help with. I set myself a time goal to have at least 10 gods designed by the end of the day, and I ended up with 19:

• The top 5 used reference
• The rest were quick 15-30 minute thumbnails with a specific god in mind
• Egyptian gods on the left, Norse in the middle, Greek/Roman on the right.

During this process, I used reference for the first 5, then felt I was stealing, so I went on to more basic shapes to get some more original designs.

I also tried to focus on creating a visual shape language to help easily identify the worlds each god belonged to; rounded shapes were for Egypt, triangular were Norse and Square was Roman/Greek. (this ended up changing around by the end)

This was a good starting point, and I had to start to refine the designs and revisit them with the new shape language. Particularly for Hel, she has had the most iterations on her design which I really enjoyed doing.

First, second and third rounds of design Iteration for Hel:

• Here I focused on getting a variety of rounded silhouettes
• The vibe was fierce, yet spooky
• A very teenage emo girl vibe
• Going for a half alive – half dead look
• And also using the more successful silhouettes in a lineup with the other gods to see if they feel cohesive.
• Second round of iterations started to feel too busy
• Simple appeal brought back into the 3rd round of iterations while referencing viking clothing more.

Hair Design Thumbnails for Hel: Bottom Right was selected.

• Here we wanted something that was cool and flowy for her hair
• I went through lots of different ideas trying to figure it out
• Also had to consider what would be best for the animators/riggers.

 

I then has a go at concept sculpting Hel to see what would work best in 3D, as well as taking screenshots and painting over the 3D model for different variations:

 

 

Environment Design:

I ended up on the environment team after doing Characters, and I found this to be a hard transition at first, because I was working on stuff that wasn’t people! But I did my best at carrying through the shape language into the buildings.

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Prop Design:

Again I found this more of a challenge than character design, but it was a bit more flexible than environment because I was given props that had human features and the possibility of bringing in some emotion.

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• Things I learnt while working as a part of a team:  

1. Team Goals

Working as a team or in a department, you’re responsible for delivering a specific set of requirements to the leads/directors/clients. And as a team, you need to divvy up the workload appropriately in order for this to happen.

I knew I wanted to do Character design this time around, and I put my hand up to do this, I was more than happy to do props or environment if nobody wanted to work on those, but it all turned out well and I was fortunate to be able to have a go at what I wanted to do. (I ended up working on these as well in the end too!)

Within the character design team, I wanted to see what other people were working on to decide on what I needed to do. So I learned to be flexible when deciding tasks that need doing in order to best help the team as a whole.

    2. Collaboration

It’s super important that in order to achieve what the client/directors want, that you work with others and respect the work they do and differences that they bring to the table.

I learned that while something I do mightn’t be what the client/director/leads were looking for, that this just meant it was one step closer to what they did want by eliminating a possibility. And that this is never a ‘dig’ at me personally or my skills as an artist.

And also taking inspiration from the successful elements of other people’s work (not only within your own department, but across others such as the environment and concept sculpting teams) in order to reach a design that is cohesive and successful.