Reflective Journal: Week 4

Further Vehicle Variation 

A very far back leaning motorbike, using one of Sam's vehicle thumbnails. It took a bit of finagling to figure out where someone could sit on top of this vehicle silhouette, and I ended up with something viable(?) but goofy-looking. It's kinda fun and funny, but probably a little too goofy.

 

    I tried instead to place the driver inside by filling it out, which unfortunately does remove the cool center circle.

 

 Left: original thumbnail, filled out, then turned into a car.

Right: similar car design with the top taken off and replaced with just a (precarious) windshield. 

 

    I think an open top car suits our character best as it reflects quite a few of the common racing vehicles, as well as convertible cars which have a 2000s preppy kind of association (see: Mean Girls, "Get in loser, we're going shopping.")

 

    I also cleaned up this car design as people quite liked it, but I thought the drawing was a bit messy and hard to read which is not great for an already complex/confusing design: 

    It's based off of go-kart designs which have all the vehicle frame and engine parts out without a casing. To avoid an over-complicated design, maybe we should cover these parts, although I'd like to still keep the open and light aspects of the car.

 

Character Refinement 

    Sam took all the ideas we and others liked the most from our variations, then we further refined the design together.

 

    The first changes were to find a balanced preppy outfit that also suited our character's personality, and attaching the "tail" part of the design onto her outfit. We tried something generically girly, then tried a more school uniform outfit. The uniform felt a little too formal and frankly boring, and so we gave her a more casual top under her blazer. The goggles that Sam added reminded me of the semi-aquatic nature of amphibians, and so the top is intended to be a swimsuit that our character is wearing under her regular clothes (like she's ready for a swim at any point in time), but it's not exactly clear that it's swimwear, haha. We re-imagined the tail as a kind of blazer coat-tail. We also redrew her gloves as racing gloves, and made other small adjustments.

 

    A big bit of feedback we got was about how difficult she might be to 3d model later on, especially the double-layered, pleated skirt we gave her (many of the other details could just be texture painted on a flatter shape). We changed the skirt to something more basic, and later simplified her hair shapes:

 

 

Touch-ups I made while putting off doing more vehicle design:

 - More defined and simplified hair tufts.

 - Bigger and simplified ear.

 - Shoulder pads worked into the blazer a bit more.

 - A sleeve clasp thing (might make the 3d modeling job harder though).

 - Wider skirt waistband, and more natural skirt flow.

 - More minor things: necklace angle, redefining lines around the skirt/waist/blazer intersection, smoother coat-tail curve.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next Steps:

 - I need to put all this in the design doc 🫡

 - Deciding on a direction for the vehicle design 

 - Colour palette work

 - Turnarounds? Are we starting that next week?