Reflective Journal: Week 7

-We've been assigned our groups and given the design bible for this next assignment.

I found that the character turnaround would have been difficult to work with so I roughly redrew it. 

I mainly fixed up the symmetry and alignment, as well as clarifying the costume. I made some minor changes/decisions with the costume and tried to base these off of the 2D team's variation sketches and aesthetics. 

 - It was unclear to me whether the tail was a coat or cape and whether the belt was under or over the coat. In their earlier variation sketch (shown on the right), the belt went over the coat so I went with that. 

 - I made the wrist cuff areas fluffy - this is how they appear in their hero image.  

 - I attached the spiky parts to the collar, making the spikes around his neck more of an upturned collar.

 - I connected the six feathers to two spots at the base of the back of his collar just because that seemed to fit while I was working on it. I have since read the note in the doc that states that the feathers are attached to the back of the coat. This isn't much of an issue as the feathers should be pretty simple to model and adjusting/finding their positioning should be fairly straightforward.

 - I adjusted the hat and boots to be more accurate to classic cowboy hats and boots. I forgot to add the spur but that shouldn't be too difficult to figure out in a 3D space.

I didn't redo the face closeup and arms because I don't think they give us any extra information. We'll probably model the hands off of average hands since we'll need the topography guidance anyway. The ones we model will just be very sharp at the tips.

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The vehicle turnaround drawing appears workable. It looks like the wheels have perspective or are unusually tapered. We might change this. The front plate should be raised higher above the ground as well. In terms of the design complexity, we will just begin with basic forms and build upon this with the details. The pillar connections don't appear to be necessary for the 3D model - if we want the model to have animate-able wheels, we could just have the wheels be separate objects from the body and have central discs on the wheels which are also separate

We'll split the work with two of us working on the character, and two working on the vehicle. We imagine that the character model will be finished quicker than the character which could mean that those two can help with the vehicle details later on.