The Matriarch - Character design
During the Fall season, I was contacted by a team of students who needed help designing their main character for their animation synthesis project at the University. It was for a cinematic set in a post-apocalyptic universe inspired by Pascal Blanché's artworks. It was pretty interesting to work with this kind of aesthetic!
Later on, Leo Ferland-Labbé who worked on Dead by Daylight and Meet Your Maker, stepped in to help and gave us some very useful advice. Here are the iterations I did and the final result.
Excited to see how the character will turn out in 3D a few months from now.
Cheers!
This is the final design. We adjusted the color accent so that it doesn't look too similar to the villain, who uses orange-red.
Early sketches for the character. I went a bit freeform and explored some ideas that I had. The designs were too similar to knights so I changed direction afterward. Sorry, notes are in french!
Early silhouette explorations. I went with exaggerated shapes and took inspiration from Pascal Blanché's various character designs.
After we selected the most suited silhouettes, I added a bit more textures to give a more industrial/damaged look.
I transferred the design to an A-posed character model to get the proportions. But we felt that something was off.
A few doodles later, we gave her a look that was easier for rigging and gave her more cloth material. I tested some head shapes, but we ended up with something closer to a crest.
The students wanted a mechanical sword that would open, but it had to look industrial. We took inspiration from Xenoblade and Meet Your Maker.
The students also had the idea early on of having some kind of mechanical shield. I tested something a bit more sci-fi as well. After a while, the shield was removed entirely and we kept only the sword.
Early sketches for the character. I went a bit freeform and explored some ideas that I had. The designs were too similar to knights so I changed direction afterward. Sorry, notes are in french!