Before all this game art stuff kicked off there was one thing I used to love to draw more than anything else. Characters. I say that as though my opinions have changed, they haven't, it's still my favourite thing to do in terms of artistic expression. To this day I'm fascinated as to how to represent qualities, personality, ideals onto a piece of flesh and bone. I mean it's almost countless aspects, some blatant and grand, others subtle to the point of almost infinitesimal proportions.
It's these that make up the entirety of a persons character, gait, clothing, body language, haircut anything that can express who they are as an individual will come across in some way shape or form.
Have you ever noticed, for instance, the phenomenal distance you can recognize an individual who you are on close terms with. Be they friend, lover or mother. Without hearing voice, having the recognition of facial features or being able to make out the specifics of what they are wearing. They will turn the corner of the street a good fifty feet from where you are standing and the way they carry themselves will tell you who it is almost instantly.
As far as I'm concerned this is the most important thing to consider when designing a character. They have to be convincing, better than any actor, the viewer....or in our case the player must believe everything they are being told from every aspect of that character. Dialogue, design, animation all come together to sell the character as a certainty.
The reason I bring this up as I drink tea, eat biscuits and listen to Funeral for a Friend is this. We've got to model a character...and this, this above all other things, is the reason that I am here. So admittedly a low poly Gladiator already puts me in a position where I don't have ultimate freedom of design but it certainly gives me enough to make me excited.
Fundamentally this is a project teaching us to model human anatomy, now I'm pretty good at anatomy from a general standpoint but this is gonna force us to learn how to translate that to the topology of an effectively recognizable 3D figure.
So I'm going to be trying to keep blogging about this project just because I actually have a decent amount to say on the subject...or at least I feel as though I do. Granted we already have to make a design doc explaining the majority of our project but all the same I can put some of it on here too. Now as well as general anatomy research I went ahead and grabbed a few bits of reference just to get the old idea machine running, this isn't all of it just a little moodboard to get me stated with preliminary sketches.
As it stand I'm liking the idea a gladiatorial warrior woman, lightly armoured (though not scantily clad) and armed with a trident and net. Though I am looking at a fair few other ideas as well. Mostly because I can already see myself going over the tri limit on unnecessary details. Seriously how could I do extremely low poly dreadlocks? Well in any case, plenty of time to refine my idea.
Throwing in my final piece for my interesting character as well 'cause why the hell not. She's the wise old hag lady of a village who lives in a nearby bog and may or may not consort with strange and untrustworthy being of a magical nature. 
