09: Mass Effect

I replayed Mass Effect over the last few days. It served to reinforce to me just how dull a lot of the alien designs are. For the most part they are just humans with very different proportions and heads. The more interesting creatures in the story are either cast as villains (Reapers) or are relegated to side roles, such as the Hanar. I found myself looking around to see what other creatures existed in this universe besides bipeds. There is some interesting designs such as the Pod Crab above, which seems to act somewhat akin to a grazing animal such as a cow, as in the game they spend most of their time in herds that roam the shallow waters of Virmire (presumably feeding on the molluscs there). I would have loved to see more interesting creatures playing a larger role within the game.

08: Creature One

A bit of practice in ZBrush. This was more of a technical exercise to practice sculpting than anything else. Though I'm very pleased with some of the ideas that are going on in this sculpt, such as the weird leg/arms. Though I'm less pleased with the long "crutches" that the creature uses for balancing on. It was inspired by octopi, squids and other cephalopods which I kept coming back to as reference.
Overall I'm rather pleased with the this and I feel like its a good starting point for getting some creature work done. 

I'm also currently in the process of developing a list of case studies to perform to illustrate some issues that I think there is with creature designs in a lot of sci-fi. From there it will allow me to develop a framework that I can use to analyse my own designs as-well as others, and aid me in coming to some more interesting places creatively.

07: Refinement

I had a conversation with another lecturer today. During this we went over a lot of points about what this project could become and some of the directions it could take. It became apparent that I'm less interested about how an audience reacts to a design and its place in the story overall, but rather how the methodology of design could be changed to produce something more original. Of course with the end users opinion being part of the final critical reflection.

Analysis of existing designs and design methodology is an important part of this as-well as examining just why a lot of designs tend towards being humanoid. There's a lot of scope for exploring the sort of technology and culture some of these creatures may develop as-well, would they wear clothes? Would they even understand the concept of clothes? These are the kind of things I want to explore in the designs and in the research.