FMP - Week 1

I'd spent quite a lot of time thinking about what I want my FMP to be, considering this is essentially my final showcase of my game art skills. I’d been considering a lot of different themes, styles and approaches during the start of 3^rd year but ultimately, I wanted this project to hold a thematic I enjoy and would be passionate about enough to make the final thing look amazing. 

That being said, the brief I’ve come up with for my FMP is the theme “Ghost Arcana”. I’ll be creating 3 characters based on tarot cards but have them be ghostly/undead in a way. They’ll be made in a hand painted style similar to World of Warcraft and/or League of Legends presented in Unreal Engine 4(and potentially Marmoset for beauty shots). The 3 characters will be 2 humanoid characters and 1 creature to give myself a range of characters to produce.

As we have 14 weeks roughly to complete our FMPs, I want to make sure I’m pacing myself correctly within this time and that I’m managing my time well enough to produce 3 characters I’m proud of. So, I created a Gantt chart that showcases my tasks weekly up until the hand in date. This first week I’ve been planning and concepting my idea so no major progress has been made but I feel as though this will help me stay on top of things better at the very least. The timing for each task is an estimate and I’ve included some “buffer” time on certain tasks (i.e. texturing) but I essentially want to have each model full done within 4 weeks. That should take me up until Easter where I can go back and polish anything or fix issues.

But like I mentioned, I’ve been planning and concepting for this first week. For my Ghost Arcana characters, I chose to base them off the 3 tarot cards: the High Priestess, Justice and Judgement. I gathered reference pertaining to the style I wanted each character to have but also to create a unifying theme between them. I took a lot of inspiration from the game “The Ruined King” in particular as there were a lot of interesting undead creatures that were closer to ghost than, for example, zombie which I really liked.

 

Since I’d limited my time with concepting, I didn’t spend too long on iterating and trying out various designs for each character. I wasn’t exactly breaking the bank on new ideas with these concepts, my main focus was creating something that fit my theme and something I thought I could execute well in 3D.

These were my final concepts for the characters + weapons.

 From this I’ll go straight into sculpting. I plan to do the High Priestess first so once I get the blockout of her done I’ll be fully into the thick of it with this FMP.