Hackberry Hollow

Here’s part 2 of what was posted last week regarding using Alchemy to aid in character design. I wonder what will happen when we take the new shapes and apply it to our original concept and rendering style?

After the jump we’ve got some information on the process of how we take the random shapes and use that to create an actual design.

The first step was looking at the shapes and seeing the robot inside of it, kind of like seeing the resemblance of objects in clouds. When using Alchemy I was able to  place the objects so that they roughly matched our original concept of our robot, so that made things a little bit easier in adapting the randomness to our original robot concept.

Because these robots are mechanical and we want everything in Hackberry Hollow to be believable, we want to make sure that they can move around in the ways that they need to, and that parts of the robot don’t intersect with each other. So I put the lower legs on a new layer and rotated them up, drawing on both layers showing where I wanted the parts to meet when the legs are curled up. After that I rotated the legs back. The same thing was done with the torso, and will be done with the feet when I get around to it.

There’s still a lot of tweaking that needs to be done (like fixing what side of the hand the thumb is on!), but it’s a good start in a new direction that looks stronger than our original design.