Final Character Renderings & More Research

This week around, our task was to take our most successful character concept from last week, make some final iterations, and make a final character render. Though, it's very likely that what you see right now may undergo a few more minor edits before they are truly complete. The process is really one based on constant iteration, no matter how minor! This is what we have been working on for the last week.

Ashley has been concepting a lot of our visual effects! She has a really great vision for the Ley Lines world and these smaller details that would truly bring the world to life.

Here's the work behind the first passes of some of the visual and lighting effects so far. The Ley Line  beam and particles done in cascade. The third image is the base material for the caustic light tests.

As we get deeper into development and move closer towards our end style goal ... 

Lauren helped a lot along this process by spending a good deal of time looking into different style elements for Ley Lines and possible art solutions. We now have plenty of options in mind for converging the color, linework, shading, and crosshatching elements of Jean Giraud's work into one cohesive end product.

We also thought it necessary to look into the various patterns of both Moebius artwork and the Sami, who serve as one of our cultural and design references. We are also using the work of Brittney Lee, who worked on Disney's Frozen, due to the way she simplified Sami and other Norwegian patterns into something that was very eye-catching, well integrated into character and environment design, but not distracting.

Along with all of that, our animation style guide is almost complete! We are definitely keeping the scale of the Ley Lines project constantly in mind. We currently have estimated the minimum number of animations every character in our game will need. There currently needs to be more talks among the art and design team before we can reach a finalized list of needed animations for every character. Nonetheless, we have a good feel for what each of these characters will need in terms of movement, flexibility, general actions, and what camera angle we should be keeping in mind when the animations are made.