Week 2: Blockouts, early sculpts, and crucial feedback

Week 2 was where I finished my proposal presentation and started getting more of the ground work done for my assets. The main focus was for the character blockouts to be complete, and to get a start on Sonic's sculpt. Right now I'm ahead of my schedule, though I feel as though I could be working a bit harder given that a lot of my schedule was made in a safety net fashion in case things go wrong.

My first priority was getting Sonic's blockout completed. For the most part I followed the concept art that I made for this, but I ended up experimenting with the face a bit. I ended up seeing how Sonic would look with a bit more of a cat shaped mouth, and whilst I personally liked it at first, I was proven that it probably wasn't ideal for the character when it came to getting feedback. People also gave feedback on the nose, saying it should probably be a bit longer.

The most critical and important feedback I recieved for the face was from Laia Flores Lledo, and as someone who does character design and concept art she was able to give me some strong pointers into the right direction and what to avoid doing. I had fallen very far off track with experimentation, so this has helped massively at pulling myself back together and staying more focused on having Sonic looking unique but still feeling familiar. This also has some ideas for the shoes and gloves included that go for a more modern look than the classic gloves and shoes Sonic normally wears. Fingerless gloves are fairly straight forward, though I will be grabbing plenty of reference for shoes in order to give Sonic shoes that look a lot more modern.

Here are the results after applying the feedback recieved to the sculpt. A lot more stylised, and already feels a lot more expressive than before. This is a good reminder to myself to not go too far off track when doing characters. This week I will be focusing more on the gloves and shoes before returning to face.

I began the full body of Eggman having only done the bust a week prior, mostly for test purposes. I'm aware that a lot of this body will be covered up by clothing, but it's important to try and get the anatomical forms in anyway as it can help a lot when it comes to shaping the clothing.

I'm unsure if I'm going to be able to learn Marvelous Designer within the time I have, since I didn't put that as part of the research in my prosoal presentation. It's an ideal skillset to have and one I should have learned a lot sooner, though if I'm unable to get anything made within Marvelous then I will just try and have my clothing be made in ZBrush instead.

As for my xGen hair testing for Eggman's moustache, I'd say it went better than expected and was a lot more straight forward than I thought it would be. It did turn out messy as I had use a few too many guides. I'm also on the fence about whether to go forward with exporting the groom into Unreal Engine or if it would be wiser to do hair cards instead, although using a groom imported into Unreal Engine 4.26 with it's new grooming features would be more impressive on a technical side of things and saves time over placing hair cards.

I decided to also begin the blockout of the Green Hill Zone diorama early on, mostly focused on the shapes and placements of the objects in this scene. I'm not going to to go into much detail at this stage as I want to focus more on the characters for the time being, though I did make a headstart by getting a simply version of the item box monitor done. When I'm ready to begin the diorama scene, I will bring this blockout into ZBrush for detailing the palm tree + making the leaf design for high poly baking, detailing the sunflower, and adding rock deformation to the island. Background mountains and islands will also be made, albeit with slightly less detail as they're further away.

Week 3 will be focused on making a finished version of the Sonic sculpt, and retopologising if possible. If there's time, I will also see if I can fit in some practice for Marvelous Designer. This can be moved to the week after if possible.