Character Design - Mirror Opposites

Character Design - Mirror Opposites

Ok I've been thinking about the kind of characters that I want to create and model over the summer and I've decided upon the classic hero and villain. So what makes a hero? and what makes a villain? Well since I'm only designing a the look of the characters I can't really rely on having an epic back story to tell their stories so I have to do this through how they look, and make these two characters look different.

What I can think of is my vast knowledge of final fantasy. When designing their characters they often use mirror opposites on their main characters often the main antagonist and protagonist. For instance on the left is an image of the promotional artwork for the Final Fantasy 7 film 'Advent Children'. The character 'Cloud' (left) is meant to directly contrast the character Sephiroth (right), his blonde spiky hair the exact opposite to Sephiroths long silver hair. What is interesting is that the conventional use of colour to define good and evil isn't used here, typically the good guy will be dressed in bright vibrant colours while the bad guy will wear dark moody colours, here more subtle methods are used to determine good and evil.

Again this presents a problem as I am only designing my characters not telling their story while in final fantasy the characters develop into their roles of good and bad, Sephiroth for instance started out a great hero and only turned bad after he found out he was created from some alien but that is another very long and confusing story for another time.

A better example of mirrored characters comes from Final Fantasy 8. The characters are exact opposites and rivals in everything, this is shown best in their character design. Squall (right) the main character has brown hair and a short jacket while his rival Seifer (left) has blonde hair and a long jacket. This use of mirror opposites is best shown in the scars they have on their faces. Given to each other in the epic opening movie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q09quI356sQ (watch it is awesome) they both go across their forehead and down under their eye in opposite directions.

This is more of the idea I want to use two characters that are opposites in most ways, and it is easy to see that they contast each other in some way. It's going to be quite hard but fun at the same time and something that I really want to look into. If nothing else it will be good practice for my third year when I have to actually do this for a project.

Another Perfect World?

Another Perfect World?

Wow! I've just watched a programme on the TV channel More 4 called 'Another Perfect World?' basically it is about online gaming, and I really wish that it came out a few months ago when I was studying this kind of thing. But I'm posting now out of genuine amazement in the program and seeing just how deep, confusing and big these 'worlds' that are created online are.

I think its right to use to word 'world' when talking about MMOs, people actually live in these places spending more time there than in the real world, they have their own currencies and economy's, one in particular 'EVE Online' has its own countries. There's even a hypothetical Decleration of Rights for Avatars which can be found at; http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/playerrights.shtml. I'm amazed and quite embarassed when I was looking at all of this stuff I commented on the graphics and how big the games where (this can all be found on my blog... if your interested) but I totally missed all of these aspects of the games, I realise now that these aern't games that you play they're worlds that you live in. I still think that the whole idea of living in an online world is flawed but its an interesting phonomenon non the less, having played a few of the games mentioned in the program I understand what they are talking about.

It's hard to explain but the power especially in MMOs is with the stronger players, just because they are the biggest or the strongest it doesn't make them the best people to lead a country, you wouldn't make Ricky Hatton prime minister (even though he's an absolute legend) just because he can throw a hard punch. So what you end up with is nothing more than a tribal society where the strongest man is king. But what a found most amazing is how the program showed a revolt on a game called 'Lineage' where all of the weaker players revolted together against the bigger players who ruled the world. This just shows however that these aern't games they're places where people live out lives different to their own, maybe it's possible to create a society online that is perfect and we can all live in it like the Matrix. Who knows personally I can't think of anything worse but it could happen, I enjoy gaming and like the idea of MMOs creating a character that represents me and roaming around with a cool sword doing quests, things that I can't do in the real world but not totally living in the world.

For me its a game not a world but things are very different for other people, but if thats what they want to do. Very interesting and brilliant show though.

Update - Past Project and Future Plans

Update - Past Project and Future Plans

Ok its been quite a while since I posted anything on here, This is mainly because I put so much effort into finishing my final project that I didn't even want to see a computer again! the mear sight of photoshop or flash makes me cringe. But ahh well worse things have happened, I got my project in on time (just).

I've got mixed feelings about it really it got to the point that there shouldn't have been enough hours to get it done, but I managed to finish it however the quality wasn't as I'd planned it to be. I found a few mistakes with the coding, simple stuff really but I didn't have the time to check it through, but at the same time I'm happy I got it in on time. I'm hoping that it does alright (atleast passes) and then I can look forward to the next year after I've had a wicked summer. And next year I'm going to get my project management skills sorted, it's always been my problem and stopped me working to my best so it's time to change. Anyway I'll post my final piece up soonish, after I've made a few changes.

So onwards and upwards but what I am most disappointed with is my 3D work on my Identities project. This is the area that I want to go into next year and my Avatar wasn't what I intended. I spent too long learning the program and then ran out of time at the end, so I didn't have time to texture it properly and ended up with very basic colours and no shirt!

So I want to solve this and do some 3D work of my own, the reasons for this are simple... I spent a lot of time learning 3D studio max so the skills are there but they don't show in my final project, also I want to develop my skills further so I get much better and finally I'm really interested in part of the character designing project that will be in the 3rd year (I think). This sounds wicked I've always been interested in character design and this would be my ideal career (if i'm very very lucky).

So over the summer I'm going to design and atleast start 3D modelling a couple of cool characters. I want a real final fantasy style look to these characters because they are probably some of the characters in any form of media that mean the most to me, probably because the games and so long and deep that you feel like you've actually gone on a journey with them. I probably won't be able to achieve this but I want to design a cool couple of characters and see how it turns out.

Anyway I'll post up some rough sketches soon, till then....