3D Style Test

After completing my  screenshot mockups, I then continued to draw a full body concept for Detective Carnaby, showcasing how he could look at the beginning and ending of game.  I tried to create a contrast between Carnaby's costume by removing the millstone collar and making his face paint faded by the end. This, in addition to the dirt on his clown costume by the end enables Carnaby to be separated from the carnival in both his costume and his mindset.

With these concepts completed, I then gathered all of the concepts based on the same costume for Carnaby together for easy reference:

With this done, I moved onto the 3D style test. I first gathered reference from 'Making of Backwater Gospel', making notes about the process I will need to use to achieve a similar result:

After this, I focused on drawing the main face in Photoshop (I used the 'Gouache Round Variable' brush for the smaller, more precise strokes and the 'Big Wide Softy' brush  for the larger strokes - both of these brushes are from Kyle's Paintbox). I was initially going to add the eyebrows and mouth separately so they could be animated, but when I considered the third person camera used in the game, I decided this wasn't particularly needed, and so went back and added the mouth and eyebrows to the base texture.

When I was still in Photoshop, I also created an alpha map, making the area for the face white and the background black. This meant when I added the alpha map to the plane I added for the face in Maya, the area for the face would remain, and the rest of the plane wouldn't be visible.  In order to make the alphas work, I also had to go into the Renderer settings for viewport 2.0 and set the transparency algorithm to 'alpha cut'. I then repeated these steps for the other parts of the face, and used tools like soft select to help move certain vertices like those on the collar.

Having received  feedback from this initial style test, I went back and made the nose thinner, as well as adding thicker black lines to my textures and adding a paper overlay to my textures to emphasise the paper/ origami look this style test wound up taking:

I believe doing this 3D style test was an extremely efficient way of conveying to the other members on my team the vision I have for Carnaby and the art style I imagine for the game.

~Emily