Week #7: Midterm: The Puppeteer
After presenting my ideas last week, I decided to completely scratch everything I had thought of and start anew. Starting with the character, I wanted to create a sinister villain. I also wanted the atmosphere of the entire thing to be dark and sinister (perfect for Halloween!). For my character I drew inspiration from Batman's rogue gallery, specifically The Joker, The Riddler, and The Penguin. Therefore when I created the mask for my villain, I created a mask for my villain, I decided to give him a wooden marionette face mask (much like how Batman's villains dress/look like their villain name.
For the character model, I went with Ready Player Me because not only was MakeHuman's asset browser terrible (not being able to see previews of downloadable content), but the model itself looked weird to me. It was a mix of cartoonish and realistic to me, which seemed a bit jarring. Therefore I decided to just fully embrace the more cartoonish style of Ready Player Me and went with that. On ReadyPlayerMe, there is a suit outfit which I used, but I didn't like the color of it. So I imported the model into Blender and started painting over the texture. I also imported in the mask and attached it onto the "Head" bone in the model's Armature. I took a while to get right because I forgot how to do it, but with a little Google I was able to figure it out.
First iteration
Final Look
With a character created, the next step was creating the world for this character to live in.
The first idea I thought of was to have him sitting on a throne with two of his generals in a room of soldiers. The soldiers would all be kneeling, and when he raises his hand, the soldiers would all rise in unison. I felt that while this showed that he had control over a large group of people, this wasn't exactly "evil" in portrayal. Also a lack of soldier models in a similar style to ReadyPlayerMe meant that I had to alter the idea a little. When I realized that this project would be due a few days before Halloween, everything came to together so easily. I thought of Frankenstein, a deceased creature brought back to life because of its "master".