Brian Crick

Sam is Pretty

 

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:

uniforms-4-april-2013

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.

sam-4-april-3013

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.

 

Copyright © 2017 Brian Crick.