Project Forlorn

This week I did some more revisions to the hair.  The look of Kaelis was another one of those things that kinda came to me suddenly.  I wanted the character to have short hair, for several reasons.  One was that the personality of the character I had in mind wouldn't want to deal with long hair, and the other is that a character with a helmet shouldn't have long hair for practicality purposes.  If a character were to take off their helmet only to have long, silky smooth hair underneath, it would be difficult to make it seem sensible without it being overly comical. This was another concept piece drawn by my soon to be wife.  It was one of several quick sketches, but this one captured what I envisioned perfectly.  With the costume and face locked in, we worked on a few more colored sketches together to lock in the specifics.  The design of her face was a combination of features from various Mexican athletes. I also decided to go with red as her primary color scheme.  T

After working on the face rig for the past few weeks, I've gotten less and less pleased with the way I did the main characters hair.  One of my art directions for this series is that there is no fur or hair, and all of it is modeled.  The fur on the angel's cape, for instance, is all textured in.  For Kaelis's hair, my original idea was to model it all as one solid piece, in sort of a clay model kinda style.  I wanted to avoid anime hair or anything like that.  So I made the character's hair when I modeled her, but since she's wearing a helmet in the first 2 episodes I shelved it until now.  Technically I still have another episode to make where she's still got her helmet, but I felt compelled to figure it out now. Looking at the hair in unreal, I found it to be just sorta okay.  It was acceptable for the style when lit and rendered, but it lacked a certain something.  And if I was thinking that, then normal people will probably look upon it with disgust and i

I'm quite thankful I had some time this week to sit down and hammer out the layout for Episode I.  I have daylight savings time to thank for that.  These last few weeks have been a whirlwind of personal events, and in a good way.  Wrap parties, meeting old friends, helping out on old projects, exciting new work, the list goes on. Oh, and I got engaged!  That's very exciting, if I do say so myself. The layout for the first episode wasn't too much trouble.  What will be interesting is how it will come together with animation.  A lot of the angles and the timing of the scene overall will come down a lot to how the animation turns out.  Normally I'd rough in the animation, if it were a normal professional project, but since it's just me I can block in the camera to have something to animate to and call it a day.  So the good news is I'm now at the animation stage once again.  I plan on making 2 small props and some stuff first, but I don't anticipate that ta