The Wastelander: Characters
Concept art and illustration of the characters created for my original IP, The Wastelander. Created during my 6-month study in 3dsense Media School’s advanced diploma in concept art and illustration.
Three pieces were created for each character: a character sheet, visual development sheet, and material callout sheet. Finally, a title screen and keyart sheet was created to feature all characters. All 3D assets were either created through Autodesk Maya or referenced from Sketchfab, while digital paintover was done in Adobe Photoshop.
Official Synopsis of the IP: In the year 3000, Earth has become a desolate wasteland where suvival is the law. Amidst the ruins of the old world, the fortified settlement of Ashen Spire stands as a beacon of hope. Ridgevale, a young wastelander with a mysterious past, joins the elite Scavs to protect his new home from relentless threats.
Guide by the Captain of the Scavs—Aamon—and the Community Leader, Liora, Ridgevale discovers his unique abilities and confronts the dangers of the wasteland. As he battles mutated creatres and faces unforeseen challenges, Ridgevale’s journey becomes a tale of resilience, transformation, and the enduring fight for survival in a post-apocalyptic world.
The Process
The first thing that I needed to do was provide a design document and a reference board for my teacher to go through. The design document would contain several details related to my original IP such as the overall story arc, character profiling, creature profiling, locations, world building setting, and explanation for special mechanics such as the DNA mutation.
Meanwhile, the reference board would contain visual reference that would supplement the design document, as well as a summary of the details in the design document so that there there would be an easier time to peruse through necessary details. What’s important to note here is that the artstyle that I was trying to go for was a mix of Arcane and Overwatch during the beginning of this process. Eventually, during visual development, it would mostly be emulating mostly Arcane and only a little bit of Overwatch.
After the design document was approved, the next part was the exploration or “bluesky phase” in which I would provide several iterations of what my characters and creatures would look like in the world. At this point, there were 6 characters that I had to provide iteration for. Because my design document included locations with different mutations per environment, I also had to consider what creatures would look like if they were mutated due to genetic experiments, radiation, chemicals, and the like.
After a certain point of exploration, we had to remove one character due to time constraints and focus only on five for the next phase which was visual development. The left picture showcases the start of the visual development, while the right showcases feedback provided by my teacher in order to aid in visually developing my characters such as taking note of shape design and silhouette variation.
In addition to visual development, I also had to start providing the front, side, and back (FSB) sides of each character. In an industry workflow, the next step after the concept artist would be the 3D modelling. As such, to aid the 3D artist, I needed to provide the character sheet in its entirety, which included the FSB of each character. The left picture shows the initial development while the right shows the progress made after continuous feedback.
Asides from providing the FSB of each character, I also had to do a material callout for specific accessories to once again aid in the next step of the workflow which was 3D modelling. The top left and right pictures shows the initial attempt made for the callout per accessory, while the bottom left and right shows the progress made in which I tried properly rendering each accessory.
During this phase, I had to already start thinking of the layout of my concept art for each character. These were the 3 initial variations I proposed. The first would be a simple gradient. The second would be just a grey background with a black bottom border and the name of each sheet, while the final would be a colored radial background per character with some faint symbols at each side.
What can also be seen here in the rightmost picture is my progress in the material callout as I provided the render and identification of each texture per character to help the 3D modeller.
At this point, my characters have been visually developed enough to do final refinements. The right picture shows the feedback of my teacher for the final things to do per character, be it refining the render of each character, updating their FSB and Material Callouts, and providing the final layout.
These pictures provide the progress made towards the final touches for each character. The left showcases an update on the FSB for my characters. Due to time constraints, the render had to only be each character’s flats with lineart. The middle showcases the proposed final layout with a more desert-like background accompanied with each character’s symbols. Finally, the right picture showcases an update on the material callout wherein the focus now was on providing better detail per accessory, including other angles if necessary to aid the 3D modeller. Just like the FSB, due to time constraints, I didn’t fully render each accessory anymore.
Final concept art for each of the characters. As a one-minute video reel was required at the end, I had to combine certain sheets, namely the exploration and visual development sheet of each character into one. I also attempted to improve the layout by providing a metallic brown border as a way to fill up the negative space. Finally, I included a character sheet showing the keyart of the character, their FSB, and three close-up shots on details that I wanted focus on.
One-minute demo reel of my original IP.