Shaman Tortosaur

Unreal Renders

Reference Board

Shaman Design Notes

For this design, the theme I strived for was an older, more superstitious and culturally driven character. For the body shape, I originally was thinking of having him have more mass shown in design elements such as a large belly, but opted for a thinner frame once testing different blockouts. This change was influence partly by the Galapagos Tortoise which has very loose skin that I thought would fit better with a thinner body. For the head, I really liked the design from the house turtle in God of War 4, and think that flatter more beady style would fit this character. For the costume, I would like to have a large sun like ring ornament on the shell to add to that cultural theme. Along the waist, I am thinking of having some layered fabric that have multiple tools and bowl handing from the waistline. These would be used in the creation of face paints or ointments, more specific to this characters role in the world.

Research Notes

My research mainly consisted of learning from the live ZBrush demos to introduce me to better workflows and different tools. Some of the most useful things shown were morph targets, layers, and the application of packages of different tileable curve brushes, alphas, and insert meshes. While these were implemented numerous ways, one of the main takeaways was efficiency in creating, integrating, and polishing shapes.

On the more artistic side, I found the implementation of shape language very interesting. The talk by Guerrilla Games on the Quen tribe detailed how all of their costume shapes were influenced by water and flow. This included lots of curves, tapering shapes, and an overall avoidance of symmetry in size. The team spoke on how each tribe had their own shape language to distinguish their identities and related their designs to their cultures. Another interesting talking point was regarding primary, secondary, and tertiary shapes, and how this is used to direct attention. In regard to this, two points that I found most interesting was the use of rest space to split up the design, and the use of tertiary detail to break up silhouette. These strategies were used a lot on the robot design of Horizon, where the paneling constituting their shells had high detail in groups towards the edges of the shape, and broke it apart with larger areas of rest in between.