Dichotomy Everywhere

Dichotomy characters are the talk of the week. They’re practically everywhere now I’m thinking about it and actually paying attention. That leads me to my next project which I’ve mentioned before which is to create dichotomy characters. These are two opposite characters which could be anything from appearance to personality.

For this project we’re required to concept two characters which would live in the same universe and work as a pair, however due to the short time period of three weeks for this project we only have to model and texture one of the characters. We can of course make both if we want and have the time with stretch goals being an idle animation.
So to start off this project I headed straight to Pinterest and pinned absolutely anything and everything that inspired me and related to dichotomous characters. So as you can see the Pinterest board was obviously very varied and ranged from sci-fi, cartoon and low poly 3d models. From the Pinterest board I had made I made a few moodboards in Photoshop and I highlighted parts each one that I found interesting like style, budget, dichotomous characters and clothing on the characters.

I also made a mindmap real quick of different opposites that I could use to make my dichotomous characters. In the end I picked out big/small, good/bad, rich/poor and religious/extremist.

Following Mike Kelly’s lesson on Tuesday where he told us that a helpful way of coming up with characters is to make the head out of shapes as silhouettes and then draw over the top of them, I tried to do this however I feel like this isn’t a way that helped me at all. But I tried it anyway and this made me realise that I didn’t want to make human characters so I focused my ideas on humanoid animals.

So after this realisation I went to work making more silhouettes. I made some silhouettes of animals that looked more humanoid so I had them standing on their hind legs. I also had decided that I wanted the characters to be big/small so I made a bunch of small animal silhouettes and a load of larger ones. After making the initial silhouettes I paired the smaller and larger characters up and gave the some attributes.

From the pairings I had made I had narrowed down to four pairs and then I did some iterations on each pair. After iterating a few times and adding some detail over the top of the silhouettes I had decided on a final pair of characters; the gorilla and cat. 

However following the presentation in the seminar with the tutors they preferred one of the other characters which was the hippo. So I took their advice and took that silhouette and started pairing it with other animals. 

I have most of the work done for this other than my final concepts, orthographics and colour palettes. I also haven’t decided on whether this is going to be a stylised project, however I think that due to the time scale and what I want to do maybe half and half is the best way to go so in between stylised and realistic.

The plan for Monday is to start modelling as soon as I can but I need to have the orthographics.