Boss project- Princess Akila

 To start off this part of my digital project I collected some images that would help give me a solid starting point to come up with some interesting silhouettes and concepts. Since I have already finished rendering my battle arena concept I have a good idea of what I want to do for the boss as it fits in with my specific arena concept. I am going to do a quick draw over of my arena to show i plan on making my boss fit into it and give it some kind of narrative in relation to it. The boss will be a flying human monster type thing with an interesting and dynamic silhouette as I want it to really stand out with the sunset shining behind it. I have a pretty good idea of how the boss will work with my arena and specific elements to include. After collecting the images on this mood board there are some features which I am particularly keen on developing. These include the wings from the god Isis, I will be using Isis as a close refence for my boss design as I particuly like the look of some of her key points and think it will work well in my overall outlook. I have included some different viewpoints of some statues, I love how the wings are shaped in these and the unique textures on the fabric of her dress and feathers. I can also collect some refences of real animals to support my ideas further and it will give me a good look at anatomically correct structures. 

To further my contextual knowledge I decided to collect some more specific images on subjects I thought were most relevant. Since flying is the key part of my boss I decided to collect some images of Egyptian birds. I found some really good pictures of them flying showcasing the striking wingspans. I will definitely be including this in my designs as i think it is such a classic and obvious point of isis and Egyptian history. Since my boss will be a humanoid it will feature some parts form birds and possibly some other animals which I will later research if needed. On the board there are also some pictures of Egyptian women both from fictional context and a non fiction historical context through statues. I can take features from these and refine them to fit my character. Since there is a lot of reference for this topic I should be able to make a convincing and authentic boss with a twist of fantasy and creativity. I am keen to start experimenting with different textures to see how I can incorporate some typical Egyptian patterns and symbols into the design and silhouette. My next step in this project will to sketch down  range of interesting silhouette ideas in black or minimal greyscale values so that I can establish some kind of interesting shape language that lends itself to both he brief and the context. For this I think it would be interesting to look at some Egyptian artwork and see what kind of shape language is expressed through this. Furthermore birds of prey seem to be a recurring theme in Egyptian historic symbolism therefore I will look closely at this. 

I decided to do a little bit of research on existing Egyptian styled characters. There is a line of skins in league of legends that I was particularly interested in called 'Guardian of the sands'. I wanted to collect some images of this skin line as they are something that stands out to my personally within the game due to the striking colour pallets and clear Egyptian concepts and shape language. I really love how they were able to take characters which did not reflect Egyptian history in any way and turn them into really convincing and well thought out skins. Some key points in which i have picked out from these skins is there shape language that has been used. Something I have  noticed is that a lot of Egyptian artwork has very clear either round circular shapes or very vertical shapes. I think the idea of having round circular shape language comes from the idea of the sun and the god of sun being such an important part of the history and culture. This was something I considered when doing my battle arena as i included a lot of circular and vertical shape language. For my character I want to include bold round shapes such as disks and weapons which reflect this. Another thing I particular like on these skins is the contrasting yellow and teal colour pallet it really pushes these skins to fit nicely in to the Egyptian concept and adds a bold and eye-catching vibe to them. I really like this combination of colours as they opposite on the colour wheel and look very pleasant together. Since my boss will obviously be a key part to the game I want it to stand out against the arena which I have mainly done in a golden yellow pallet as it is made of sandstone. Having a more teal colour pallet will contrast nicely against this. I also plan to use very light and flowing cotton fabrics as seen in some of jannas images. Not only does this reflect authenticity it also adds context. 

Today I decided to sketch out some brief sillouhete experimentation I used my mood boards as refence for these designs. Since I am basing my arena and boss off a real historical theme I didn't want to stray too far away from this I am really enjoying  mixing up my own ideas with convincing historical ideas using artwork and statues I have collected imagery of. I'm already quite happy with how my ideas have been coming along. Each design does feature a set of wings based on Egyptian birds of prey as I have already established that my boss will be a flying woman as the arena is in a big bird cage. The wings of the character are the primary focus of the silhouette of the character and therefore I iterated different ways in which I could incorporate them into designs. For the clothing I looked up classic Egyptian clothing for women and sketched out briefly using different tonal values to give an initial idea of the greyscale values. It is important to me that I use a wide range of tones in my work as this will make for an interesting and engaging overall concept. I'm am consistently thinking about how my work will be able to develop as the process continues. I really like the wings on idea 1 in particular they have a striking and bold shape to them which suggests and element of beauty and gracefulness. At first I was going to make my concept quite gory however now I think I will make my boss a more graceful type rather than the generic evil that comes with the idea of a boss. I have an idea of her backstory and narrative already so as I develop the specific design I will add to it. I like the shape of the horizonal type wings. This was a common shape in the statues I had collected images of and in the wingspans of the Egyptian birds of prey. I have considered some basic weapons and will focus on this more in later stages. I may do some more concepts just to refine some of the ideas that I currently have into more relevent and interesting ones. 

These designs were done by refining some of the ideas I liked from my previous concepts and picking apart elements I liked most about them and combing them together, As you can see I also collected some more references to help this stage and make sure I was including creative yet authentic. I want to include more than 1 set of wings as flying is a key point to my boss project therefore I was combing multiple different sets of wings together to see what looks best. I'm am not entirely happy with the design yet so I can going to do a couple more before I start thinking about making a final piece. 

Before I do some more ideas I put a gradient map on these more refined ideas to try and establish a brief colour pallet using some Egyptian artwork I found online. I am really pleased with how the middle colour pallet is looking and I think I will sticking to this when I come to rendering my final boss. I think it will contrast nicely against the colour pallet of the arena. I like the idea of going with a gold and blue pallet as this really fits in with the typical Egyptian colour pallet that can be seen in clothing and jewellery. I think the blue will also contrast well against my battle arena. 

Before I started constructing my final boss design I wanted to mess round with some further ideas just to see if I could come up with some iterations to possibly include when constructing my finished piece. I did some research on Egyptian birds of prey and thought about including this as part of my final idea however I don't really like the look of this idea. I think I am going to stick with her as being a normal human with wings rather than having a birds head. I think my strongest design ideas are definitely on the page above as I have selected all the parts of the designs I previously liked.  

The way I have gone about making my final front and back 3/4 concept is I have started off with a 3D model that I made on zbrush and posed into a position I think will be appropriate to use in order to present a clear character design which could then be made by 3D artists. I made such that one arm was posed outwards and the body was at an angle so a good view could be shown. I was thinking about zcompositing this however I decided that I was going to take a screenshot and then paint over it directly in photoshop as I think for this particular brief I would be more confident doing this. Some areas haven't been sculpted really accurate as this will be covered up.

Here is the back 3/4 view of my character.

I started off by cutting out the 3D model and placing it onto a grey background so that I could see any colour pallets more clearly. To start of the process of adding elements I found and cut out some pieces of clothing and parts of an Egyptian bird of pretty to start blocking out my idea. I really like how these wings were looking it gives a really striking silhouette to my character. Of course I will be massively editing these and only using the initial cut out photo as a starting point. I was thinking about having the wings singed at the bottom as I had planned out in some of my iterations previously. I am currently not a massive fan of the colour pallet so again I will be editing the elements I have cut up and painting over them a lot to weave everything together to make a fitting concept that works well with my arena, As this was only my starting point I will be adding and editing this a lot as I progress through the next stages.  

here are all the images I used either as refences or I cut out and edited in order to photo bash elements onto my design. I was really running out of time to do my boss since I did spend quite a long time on my arena therefore photo bashing was a good way for me too quickly get shapes and forms down instead of drawing out each one with the correct perspective. I did get a lot of inspiration from high fashion and catwalks. I especially liked some of the more ornate designs that these fabrics included this is why I chose to photo bash some of these gold textures onto my work. I chose to add a very ornate an distinctive headpiece not only to relate back to some of the ideas form my iterations but also to help support the overall silhouette of the character as I wanted her to be clearly identifiable. The images I chose and photo bashed I also hand painted over with a multiply layer in order to correct some of the shadows. Due to my time being very pressed I forgot to take some screenshots of my process step by step but I hope that my first screenshot shows how i went about doing this. I will need to better time manage in the future as I did get off to a shaky start with both the arena and the boss and I struggled coming up with ideas that I was happy with therefore I didn't have any string or clear images of what I wanted my aim to be until oi actually started constructing the final pieces. 

Here is my finished front and back 3/4 character design. this isn't my most favourite project I have ever done but I did spend a long time on it considering I didn't have much time left after spending so long on the arena part of my project. I am really pleased with some of the textures that are present on the fabrics as it does make my character look somewhat god like and ornate. I didn't want to make a scary boss but more of a beautiful one with a captivating back story as can be red in the little paragraph on the image above or on the PowerPoint. I think if I were to do this project again I would definitely add some more detailed drawings of the staff and maybe a direct back and side view just to make sure that the design was conveyed to a 3d artist clearly and accurately. I particularly like how the wings ended up looking. I played around quite a bit with layer effects and was able to paint on this molten looking effect using these layer types. I did really enjoy this project as I love coming up with concepts and narratives for characters and trying to work them into a possible game concept a long side. Overall I do think the character is relatively simplistic so maybe I could have incorporated more elements of the birds of prey that I researched into it.