So I've started working on the sprites required to animate another character for the game I'm working on. It's still in the early stages but I figure I'll post a thread documenting my progress and my thought process/issues.

The Character: This character is Sariah the Sacred Geometer. She is a devout muslim girl from the middle-east (United Arab Emirates region) who practices a form of magic based upon sacred geometry. She is intended to be a visually coherent character who spends a fair amount of her time in her standing pose with occasional gestures to cast her spells out.

This is my concept sketch for the character:



And this is my first stage of development for her basic standing pose:




I've gotten the basic outlining done and am beginning to do the block-shading, but there's a lot of cloth and I wonder where I should be putting folds. I also get the distinct feeling that the bottom of her robe needs a better curve set up.

Translation: My "shapes tossed on some cloth" are a lazy shorthand way of implying some of the deeply engaging mosaics that are seen in Islamic geometric art. You're totally right and when I glance at the references you threw up, that's thrown into stark relief... time for me to start doodling with a purpose!

As for the cloth study... yeah... that's going to likely be the big holdout for this piece--trying to grasp the motion of the cloth. Some of the animated pieces I've seen in the gallery with cloth really are instructive about how little I understand the properties of moving cloth. I may have to youtube some videos and just try and draw lines of motion.

I hope to post a better update of the sprites and some further sketches later this week, thanks!

So, I've been working on getting the cloth studies necessary for this character and it's going to be a while (particularly with a new semester started) but I figured that I'd post one of the small animated effects I've been working on for her. In the style of the magician with a levitating fireball above his palm, I figured a point of interest for her idle animation would be some sort of floating geometric construct that she manipulates.. this was my initial attempt:

Wow, that really is a nice study... I'm already seeing a few patterns that I hadn't considered... the cloth moves in segments that each have their own start and stop timing that are sequential like dominoes. Looks like I need to figure out where the folds/creases are in the cloth and identify independent sections.

Thanks!

Edited by AimlessZealot - 14 September 2014 at 1:13pm