Ok! Let’s continue with concept art and refining the idea of a character. Once you have selected an initial sketch, you are ready to start working on the details and polishing your vision.
In this case, you can see the initial concept art for Nyx. As you can tell, Gonzalo requested some changes in order to accomplish his vision for the character (check those blue circles for more details).
But… why Gonzalo?! why did you change it??? Well, in our case, The Helix Enforcers is a team that resulted from multiple experiments with DNA manipulation and then mixed with evolution…a crazy cocktail for success! They adapted to use human artifacts that were discovered. (There are some dark stories there, but we are keeping those a secret!!!! 😉 at least for now…)
So designs can be split in Form and Function (what? are you adding design theory here??!). In our case, the hands needed to provide a more functional use as her main role is infiltration and long range coverage. Therefore, we decided to change her hands to a humanoid form. As you can imagine, using a sniper rifle with a paw is very difficult. After all, she uses a sniper rifle to protect her friends.
Her legs also needed to be stronger and more adaptable than the original design. This requirement came from the type of terrain, structures, and equipment she would be facing (well let’s say that her favorite weapon is a really big gun!). As the legs change, then her anatomy needed to change in order to be able to accommodate the bone structure (so, the pelvis structure changed too). The idea is that the character has to have a “realistic” bone structure that makes sense.
In regards of the physiognomy (fancy word for facial features and expressions 😉 ), her face needed to reflect the type of mammal she is. In this case, Nyx was able to represent a Fox without any issues. Some details were more in the ears, to keep the style of the foxes we used for reference. (remember the character bible from the previous article? … well, that file also included our research for each animal characteristic that we wanted to represent and some endangered fox species that we wished to bring some attention to).
And the process continues… Next… Let’s put some clothes on, it’s cold out there!!!!…