I don’t know what the player’s spacesuit in Tinselfly will look like.

It’s been bugging me. Real spacesuits are super bulky and wouldn’t feel right for this rather magical universe. Your typical video game space suit looks too militaristic and armored for this story. I don’t want my character in something skin-tight, and, oh–since the character could be spending the majority of the game in said spacesuit, I want something really iconic.

So I drew this wonky sketch to sort out my thoughts:

It’s not great, but I think I can work with this.

And when I say I drew this, I mean I had no idea what I was going to draw before drawing it. I drew a basic body shape, layered some clothing ideas over it, erased those, drew something new, erased bits of it, refined my drawing. I drew some loose-fitting pants at first, realized upon seeing them that I wouldn’t buy someone flying with slacks on, and changed them to tights. I drew stuff at random and did Google Image searches at random just to see how I would react to what I saw.

The design process happened almost entirely on a few square inches of paper and my web browser. Very little of the design process happened in my head. And little effort was given to making the drawing look good–the purpose of the drawing isn’t to look good. It’s to quickly explore ideas. I’m guessing that the more I accept that these drawings will look bad, the more useful they will be to me as a designer.

I don’t know how other designers work, but this was very, very different than my usual process. Usually, I try to come up with a clear idea in my head before drawing anything at all, and then I try to do a nice, detailed drawing.

But… I suspect that’s never going to work. I always find that frustrating, and I suspect it’s because, well, I have no mind’s eye that I’m aware of. (Seriously, I don’t, and only recently learned most people do, like this guy.) But I’ve trained myself to do design as if I do.

If I want to design something, I really need to just get to drawing.

And erasing.

And drawing some more.

My sketchbook is my mind’s eye. I should use it better.

* * *

The player in Tinselfly will be spending several hours in a strange, alien world. I have no idea what that looks like, either.

I Googled alien landscapes.

I want the alien world to feel a bit fairy tale, so I Googled mushroom forests.

I thought maybe building-sized mushrooms were both too on-the-nose and too Myst so I looked at crystals for a while.

I Googled crystal forests.

None of this was particularly helpful. Everything felt so… mundane. But I only realized that when looking at actual pictures. So I have come up with a new strategy. This place is supposed to be alien, right? So I’m gonna come up with a list of feelings I want the environment to evoke. I’m gonna come up with a list of technical requirements (like, will there be platforming?). And then, without thinking of landscapes or aliens at all, I’ll start drawing some abstract shapes that I think express those feelings and work mechanically. And I’ll build alien vegetation and rock formations and other scenery based on those shapes.

With any luck, by virtue of the process being so divorced from actual landscapes, I’ll come up with something truly alien and unique to this world.

Been working a lot on my Sam model for Tinselfly lately. I think it’s starting to look pretty nice.

Here are some disconnected thoughts about the whole thing:

• If you told me a few months ago that that best way to do this would be to manually create and move every single point on the model (instead of using higher level tools of some sort) I totally wouldn’t have believed you. But that’s exactly what I’m doing here.
• Right now, I’m just concentrating on making something that looks like a human — not this human. Sam will be dark-skinned, with a wider, flatter nose than this and fuller lips.
• Sam is probably dark-skinned because I have pretty in his character description. It wasn’t a conscious decision; I just think of dark skin when I think ‘pretty’. I don’t know what, if anything, that says about me.
• I added some tear ducts. It may seem like a stupidly tiny detail, given that this character will be like two inches tall on screen, but that really helped me understand the shape of the eyes.
• I am not using any specific reference. I am not tracing a photographed model or a hand-drawn character design. That would probably make things easier, but I am finding that using references of all ages, races and genders is helping me better understand facial structure in general.
• I’m not sure what’s up with the shading on the chin, lower lip, and above the ear. As far as I can tell, everything’s pretty smooth there. Gotta look into that.
• It’s nearly impossible to work on the ears without frequent renderings with shadows turned on.
  Without shadows, the ear is just a strange blob; so much of what we think of when we think of ears isn’t shape, but color.
• My model (including the body) has something like 15,000 triangles right now. I don’t know if that’s acceptable or not.
• I can’t wait to move on to Sam’s costume. 😛

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a character model for Tinselfly, and I’ve learned that it’s not enough to make a mesh that looks right. Just like classes in a computer program or layers in an Illustrator file, getting something to work is one thing; getting it to be sensible and maintainable is quite another.

So here are a few things I’ve learned lately.

The torso above is functional, the way a hastily constructed computer program is functional. It has the right shape. There’s a neck and body and arms and some definition to the collarbones.

But from an organizational standpoint, it’s a complete mess. Compare that to this torso:

Here, I’ve created a pretty strict grid. The overall shape is basically the same, but it’s easier to tell what’s going on. My mesh doesn’t just need to have a certain shape: it must also communicate to me, the modeler, what that shape is. Like well-named variables and functions, this mesh is self-documenting. I can look at these long, smooth curves on the grid and get a good sense of what those curves represent in three dimensions. I can’t really do that with the first torso; the lines, such as they are, are jumbled and jagged.

Working in this sort of way also makes editing easier. The modeling software I use has built-in tools to select whole lines or circuits on my grid, like the orange lines here:

I can also add detail to my mesh fairly easy. If I decide my character’s sides aren’t smooth enough, I can quickly add a loop cut, shown in purple here:

Loop cutting breaks every square along the loop in half, so I can refine a specific area. And once cut, my mesh is still a nice, neat grid which can be further refined with more loop cuts.

Just imposing a grid on the mesh isn’t enough, though. This face has a simple grid structure:

Trouble is, this grid isn’t structured that logically. I probably wouldn’t want to take a random cross-section of the face and move it, or scale it, or whatever.

If I want to add some detail to the eye sockets, I could add a loop cut, like I did with my torso. But this loop cut wouldn’t just affect the eyes: it would also add lots of unnecessary detail around the temples and back of the head.

So what I need to do here is change the way the grid works, just in one localized area. Like so:

Here, the area around the eyes is its own closed polar grid, while the rest of the face retains the square grid it started with. And now, if I want to add detail to the eye sockets, I can add a circular, eye-shaped cut, like this:

That loop makes sense to me. It represents an area of the model that I think of as one unit. And again, just seeing the polar grid around the eyes helps me understand the geometry of the eyes, more than the previous approach did.

One thing I’m struggling with here is this idea of adding pockets of detail. Suppose, for instance, I wanted to smooth out the contour of the eyelid. Right now, I’d have to add a loop cut like this:

…Which will add extra smoothness around the eye, but will also add unnecessary geometry down the cheeks, and along the neck, and who knows where else. I’m trying to come up with simple, general-purpose strategies for adding detail, like this method of smoothly transitioning from a coarse grid to a finer one.

That might work in some instances, though maybe not the eye specifically. I still have much to learn here.

A stupidly long time ago, I posted these costume ideas for Tinselfly.

And somebody commented how it was funny how all those little people, boy or girl, young or old, kinda looked like me. The long, mouthless faces, the skinny bodies.

I am skinny.

Oh, sure, I’ve gained a slight belly in the last few years, and my mother pokes it whenever she sees me, but I probably still qualify as skinny to most people.

When I sit down to draw or model a a character, I think of myself as a baseline. If the character is described as thin, I’ll try to make them thinner than myself.

And then I wonder why they don’t look quite human.

I am a bad baseline. But just saying that doesn’t give me a tangible sense of what the baseline is. So let’s try to throw some numbers at this.

I’m 5’11” and barely reach 150 pounds most days. I know BMI is problematic, but that puts me right at ‘normal’ according to the CDC. And by ‘normal’ they mean ‘healthy’. Average for a an American is apparently like 50 pounds heavier than I am.

According to this handy figure drawing book I’ve got, an average male has a hip width/head height ratio between 1.5:1 and 2:1. I’m 1.4:1, below the bottom of that scale. Also, my shoulders are thinner than the book’s average, at around 1.5 heads to the book’s 2.

So I’m not just a bad baseline; I’m a really bad baseline, and I’d still be a really bad baseline if I gained lots of weight, because of the slightness of my frame. I guess I already kinda knew that, but the numbers help cement it. An ‘average’ adult male would have a wider frame than me, by several inches; and they would weigh significantly more. I’m not sure how weight translates to bulkier shapes when drawing, but it’s fair to say my characters should be a lot bulkier if I want them to look like average, ordinary people.

I’m kicking off my more-natural-looking Tinselfly characters thing by not doing my lead. I’ll do a supporting, but playable character named Sam. He’s in the Navy, and will be wearing a uniform like the character on the left here:

This should be well within my abilities to model. Sam will probably have a shaved head, so I don’t have to worry about modeling hair. His uniform is neatly tailored, so I don’t have to worry about drapery or wrinkles. He’s tall and thin, so my current NPC model isn’t too far off from his body.

And he’s pretty.

Why does that matter? Because, from a certain point of view, pretty = less complicated. Smooth. Symmetric. Crisply defined.

Fewer polygons.

* * *

Part of modeling a character is getting to know the character–and I’m already starting to do that, having done nothing more than take the head on my old model and start to make it more natural looking. Which is good, because Sam is mostly defined in terms of being a foil for the lead.

So here’s what I’ve got so far: when I say ‘Sam is pretty’ I don’t mean that pretty is a thing that Sam naturally is. I mean to say that Sam puts work into being pretty; it is something he values. This is part of his character, not part of his appearance.

Sam looks quite dashing in his uniform, and knows it. But it’s not vanity so much as an obsession with neatness, and an aversion to things that are unorganized.

This works out well, because I’d planned on having a level where Sam is exploring the jumbled fragments of a destroyed, floating city, and having Sam try desperately to put part of the city back together in his head could make for interesting gameplay.

* * *

I also like starting with Sam because said exploration level is fairly self contained; I can just dive into it without worrying about how it ties in with other things. It would be a good starter level, and I desperately need one of those.