Character background of “Lady”

In my previous blog post I shared my progress on the organic 3D character modeling assignment that is due at the end of our 3D graphics course. In this blog post I will talk about the pre-production package I got from my fellow classmate Simon Brundin (https://harttago.wordpress.com). I will share the character background and some information on the game world that this character originates from.

Character background

Name: Lady

Gender:Female

Age:19 (00)

Physical health/ attributes/ handicaps:

Would be considered healthy for a dead person. Missing one eye and her actual body is mostly rotted away although this is mostly covered by bandages. Has to occasionally get a hold of a replacement eye, since she is a “kind” monster, she only steals one eye from her victims, this has resulted in her right eye socket shriveling up completely.

Movement:

She is still able to move pretty much like a human, just a bit stiffer. Being undead has some perks, she doesn’t get tired and because of her condition she is incredibly strong, as she is not necessarily restricted by her muscle mass.

Intelligence:

Highly intelligent and incredibly wise, since she has been “alive” for hundreds of years, she knows more about the world and humans than most other creatures. She does however have a hard time conveying her messages of wisdom, not only because people run away in fear at the sight of her, but also because she can only utter a few words at any given time.

Culture:

She was originally from Egypt but as time has passed and since she has traveled the world, she no longer considers herself part of any specific culture.

History

She lived out the earlier parts of her life in Egypt where she was a priestess in training. She never had any biological family that she knew of but was brought up by priests. She was killed at a very young age (ca 19 years old at the time) when she was sacrificed to Anubis, the god of death. The reason why she was picked as a sacrifice was because she had started displaying signs of clairvoyance, the priests feared this and decided to get rid of her. She did not remain dead for long and it has been speculated that she returned because Anubis did not accept the sacrifice or possibly that she was the daughter of a god and was therefore immortal. After returning from the dead, she decided to travel the world and to embrace her immortality, the first couple of hundred years were the most difficult, but eventually she became used to the solitude of immortality and learned to love herself more than the world around her. She chose her own name to be Lady since she forgot her own name after dying (this name has also changed over the course of time).

Religion:

Having witnessed the “truth” of all religions she has encountered, she has come to terms with the fact that all religion has a grain of truth, but that the “power” of the religion is created by humans themselves. Through this, she has come to the conclusion that humanity and the human soul is divine and believes herself to be in possession of an extraordinary soul (since she returned from the dead).

Hobbies:

Her main hobbies include traveling, reading, scaring people (unintentionally and intentionally), saving people and solving the mysteries of the universe.

Family:
She does not know anything about her biological family, but the ones who brought her up were priests and priestesses of old Egypt.

Friends:
At the moment she does not have any friends, but throughout her lifespan, she has made a couple of friends. Most of them have not appreciated the part of her that sometimes require her to hurt other humans. She has never really had a good hand with cats though…

Psychology:
After living for as long as she has, life and death has become seemingly insignificant. This has helped her cope with the loss of the mortal friends that she has made earlier in her life. While she does not “enjoy” hurting other people, she is not hesitant to do so when she finds it necessary but usually she tries to take care of humanity as best she can. This has resulted in people having widely different opinions of her, some see her as a monster or an incarnation of some demon, while others see her as a saint, sent to protect people.
She almost seems like she has two personalities, the dangerous one and the heroic one.

Her main goal in life:
To solve the mysteries of life and death (among other things).

About the game:

Console puzzle game, third person view.

What platform(s) is it aimed at?
Console (Xbox 360?)

Who’s your target audience?
Teens ca 16 years old.

Who’s your direct competition? (name 2-3 game titles).
Games like
Portal
Antichamber

Describe in 1 paragraph the game world:
The real world (present time) but with more fantasy/horror/mystery elements included.

Parts:

Eye
Scarf
Body (with bandages)

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Personal notes

So, with all this information written we know a little about Lady’s story as well as game world. This information does give me a hint of what direction I should go with the style and what things to keep in mind when modeling this character, just like you would in the game industry.

When looking at this character and later reading the description, there are some things that don’t quite add up in my head. Instead of ancient, the character reads more futuristic to me when you look at her hair, make-up and accessories.

He does also describe her as rotten, unkempt and as stale in her movement whereas the character concept to me reads otherwise. She seems to take care of herself really well when you look at her hairstyle and make-up. Her stance and the scarfs imply to me that she is very adventurous and should maybe be more fitting in an adventure game. The question is if I should just stick to what the pre-production package tells me or if I do have some creative input in the matter.

Visual style

Right of the bat, although this is not really described in the pre-production package I was given, I would say that the most fitting visual style of this character and game world is “cartoony”.  The highly saturated colors and exaggerated proportions of this character read more cartoony than realistic. There is also an overall quirkiness to this character that I believe will be difficult to translate to another visual style than cartoony.

Need to know

In my opinion I would like to know more about the game world that this character comes from. In my head, I see a horror inspired cartoony game where Lady adventures around collecting clues to solve puzzles. And since I mentioned before that the character reads more futuristic to me than ancient, should I omit the scarfs to make her seam less modern or are they important to the character? Should I perhaps texture the scarfs to make them seem as part of the bandages as a way to make her appear more ancient? The whole Egypt thing seem important in the character background information and I wonder if this is something I need to incorporate more to the model or if I should just really stick to what is presented.

Possible risks

When looking at this character the whole body is very reminiscence of human female with the exception of its exaggerated proportions. Because of this, I will use female reference photos when creating this model and later shape and scale the proportions after the concept art that I got. Because the model does not wear complicated clothing, I don’t think the modeling will be a problem.

The problems would arise when I reach the unwrapping of the UV because I’m not at all comfortable with unwrapping organic characters and placing seams at well hidden places. The scarfs and the head are the most complex shapes of this character so I’m a little bit curious on how I’m going to go about UV unwrapping them. I just have to pay a lot of attention when we go over the UV unwrapping of organic models in class and, if I still do struggle, maybe even look at tutorials found online.