Odette P.3

Inspiration from religious figures.

Myself and some other artists were at a conflict with the concept of 'humanely elegant demon princess who is conveniently human looking and conveniently follows the pop-culture's idea of a beautiful white woman'. I felt that concept was too much at conflict with my views on sexism and character design. We felt if all supporting characters looked nothing like humanity we would like to try have her fit in. I decided to redesign her in a more monstrous design that would fit into classical depictions of hell's creatures.

A more abstract design for Odette that was more monstrous.

I decided to design a monster design that had a simplicity and humanely form to keep players engaged by keeping her visually appealing. I was inspired by the designs for my previous work costume-wise and felt these would keep her practical, part of me also hoped we could convince the rest of the team on an Indian inspired aesthetic. Since the writer couldn't give me constructive criticism I felt rather stumped on the design, in hindsight i should have shared the design with more members to get more input as it was a group concept and a flat hierarchy. I showed it to other artists but still could not get more criticism on the design, I felt like something was lacking especially clothing wise.

Because I am the animator I took this chance to show the concept in motion, to further bring the idea. I took what I learnt from 2D animation lectures; working on the keyframes, and then the inbetween (tweens) frames. I took inspiration from other videogames that had characters with similar leg movements and various animated movies for reference to draw the digigrade legs.

For the start of the animation I drew out the basic skeleton and animated it to make sure it flowed correctly before adding any of the character's main details. I however also couldn't animate her using human anatomy due to her digigrade legs and needed to focus more on the legs than anything else.

When I sketched in the details I used follow-through on ribbons to give her more flowing speed and obvious movements and added speed liens to her legs. Animating her for concept art also helped me define which design choices would be impractical in-action and would need to be eliminated form the concept art, such as the horns on her legs are unnecessary and get in the way, clustering the design, and the horns on the back of her neck were eliminated. I would like to add more flowing elements to this design if I were to develop it further.

Example .GIFs of digigrade legs in motion from live-action stilts & costumes, to 3D videogames. I used these examples to visualize and research how the movement would work. 

I was inspired by the animations for running in the game "The World Ends With You" as I found each character having a unique and fluid run cycle interesting, I wanted to include this but found there was no real way to show that as there was only one fleshed out character in our concept. I studied work-in-progress shots of flash animated games with unique animation effects and how the animator shapes the basic animation including props and objects by leaving them blank until needed, of the game "Skull Girls". I worked in Photoshop CS6 as it is my preferred tool for animating and I am more fluent in the software than I am in Flash.

I referenced the leg movements from the stills of the sprites in The World Ends With You when making the run-cycle.

I came across these Work In Progress pieces for the Skull Girls game and found the way they animated the movement of the character without finishing the weapon which would mostly stay the same or have it's own animation cycle useful as Odette would always be carrying the weapon which in our mechanic could change constantly on it's own depending on the player's input.

I felt this was good practise and if needed I could recreate the running animation I did with a new design easier. Many of the artists preferred this design to any other, I still feel the clothing needed refining. I noted the clothing as an issue at the time and in an attempt to fix it and compromise more to the writer's desired elegant design I made a more elaborate design based on the recent one, giving her more of a regal coat-dress. I feel this design was one of my weaker attempts and perhaps that was because I was giving myself too many restraints.

While elements of this design were more refined it had less of a striking silhouette making it less strong as an over-all design. If I were to design this monster-Odette further I would incorporate the hands and face from this design as well as the hooves.