Friday 17 December 2010

Discussion Points from Academic Supervisor 2

I've just recieved another report from Lynn about our last meeting along with some tasks for me to do over the Christmas break period up till January 2011.

Meeting 2 10/12/10

We discussed the written work in great depth and planned the structure for the literature review. It may be useful to structure your review to discuss:

Define concept art/design process

The traditional concept art process (identifying individual artists’ practice throughout)

The 3D concept art process (identifying individual artists’ practice throughout)

Identify common themes in both processes

Break down advantages and disadvantages of these themes

Suggest how the project will explore this subject further

The literature review should be around 1,500 words in total. Try to use the quotes and references to support your argument rather than reiterating their point. Once you have drafted your research proposal, you can send a copy to l.love@abertay.ac.uk for feedback.

We discussed your sketchbook and the characters that are being developed. It may be wise to identify an eighth character to develop. In your research sketchbook, it may be useful to dedicate one page to research each of your eight chosen character types. This will link nicely to your development drawings and will highlight what has inspired each character more specifically. It may also be useful to experiment with colour throughout your sketchbook.

Gordon suggested that you create mood boards for the four characters that you plan to develop. This is an excellent idea and I highly recommend that you consider this. In these mood boards you can research surfaces, design and proportions along with personality and character.

For the presentation of your models, it may be useful to find an animator to produce animations of one of the characters. This would allow you to focus on design, modelling and texturing but would also aid the presentation of the models.

In your research questions and topics it may be useful to narrow our research to characters for computer games rather than animation and computer games. Your process focuses on a game pipeline so the research should mirror this. It is also useful to add evaluation into your research somewhere. We must evaluate the process undertaken in the research. This can be a personal evaluation of your process, but we could add the feedback from your animator as part of this evaluation.

Suggested reading:

Prepare to Board – Nancy Beiman

Ideas for the Animated Short by Kate Alexander and Karen Sullivan

Better Game Characters by Design: A Psychological Approach (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive 3D Technology)

d'Artiste Character Design (D'Artiste)

Game Character Development: Digital Sculpting for the Realtime Artist by Anthony Ward

Agreed action points:

  • E-mail Belinda to check that a digital sketchbook can be submitted
  • E-mail Gregor for feedback on pre-production essay
  • Continue Mudbox and ZBrush experimentation
  • Continue development of proposal – expand reading to books and journals
  • Continue drawing characters – add an eighth category for design
  • Take one of your concept drawings and try to create it in Zbrush/Mudbox as a proof of concept
  • Send draft copy of proposal to l.love@abertay.ac.uk for feedback.

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