How EVAA came to life

The Journey of EVAA from conceptualization to the final

The character - being a figment of my imagination - was brought to life through a series of research, refinements, modifications and finalizations.

As the story is set in a world of robots somewhere in the future of an amalgamated Asian territory, the character design would have to match the setting well. In order to achieve this, I carried out a decent amount of research to define my character's elements with the traits she is meant to have.

Her basic profile was to convey her traits as evil, gangster, and a criminal. This is because, she is wanted for a crime in the story. This crime is meant to be open-ended to the viewers but all that is needed to know is that she is being hunted down by the police.

As I dove into the psychology of Non-Conforming Asian Women, our story low-key gives a deeper meaning to her backstory

Character Design Elements

I wanted her to resemble the most trendy looks of our time, mainly from the Asian side. Looking through images of the fashion and lifestyle of current asian women, I decided to add these minor elements that would portray her to be from that time, era and culture.

Emphasis on the details of: The charging port on her thigh, the earring design, the waist bag.

Color Scheme

Proceeding into creating a suitable color scheme, I decided to research on the colors of evil, danger and mystery. According to Disney's Villain color theory, red is used for villains with anger and passion (McGuire, 2017, p.1). It seemed fitting to give her a very bold appearance with a darker red to compliment the jade green glow in her eyes and electric circuit lines (as tattoos).

Through trials and refinements, this is the color scheme I came up with. Additional dirt materials will be added to give her a dusty alleyway look.

Overall color scheme and materials. Refinements and modifications have been made to the model as well.

Facial Refinements and Inspiration

The face is the most important aspect of the entire character. It is what defines who she is by the very minute details you can put in. Hence, I had to be extra careful with the facial details.

The eyes tell a lot about a character's nationality as different eye shapes speak well for various ethnicities. Since she is going to represent an East Asian ethnicity, she needs to have the certain eye shape that most Korean/Japanese people have. It was definitely a challenge to create this but I managed to accomplish it after a series of feedback and refinements.

I used this image of an Asian woman as reference to shape the overall look of my character's face.

For the overall look of the face (especially the eyebrows and the panel lines), I took inspiration from some well known art in the industry. I was intending to give the panel line appeal from Ghost In a Shell (2017) and the eyebrow look from this Red Fox poster I came across on the internet.

The eye drop and the eye makeup was also inspired from this Red Fox poster since it seemed edgy enough to fix the aspects of the character's traits.

Overall, I need some good amount of reference material to build up the facial elements

My Final Character Outcome & Self Evaluation

The journey of this character from conceptualization to the final was extremely hectic and painstaking. However, it was a great learning experience. I believe I have made a few mistakes by choosing to sculpt my character from scratch on a totally new UI instead of using the classical method of the production pipeline. Since I struggled a lot in the initial stages with familiarizing myself with the software and with the added delay in our production schedule, I feel that I haven't achieved my best with this model. I believe I could still do better and that most of the textures were pretty rushed in this one. I will admit that my time management was the cause of this, but I did my very best in the circumstances I was in. Due to network failures, multiple file corruptions/crashes and changes in our production workflows, I was put behind. This affected my self-confidence too.

In overall, this character was fun to conceptualize but later became a burden when multiple tasks began shifting in our production workflow. I would strive to do way better in the future, but I will take every issue I faced with this character as a learning experience hereon.

References:

Arad, A., Paul, S. & Costigan, M. (producers), Sanders, R. (director) (2017) Ghost In A Shell [motion picture]. United States: DreamWorks Pictures, Reliance Entertainment, Arad Productions

Lo, I. (2018, July 13). The Non-Conforming Asian Women [Research article]. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/living-emotional-intensity/201807/the-non-conforming-asian-women

McGuire, S. (2017, July 28). What Disney Villains Can Tell Us About Color Psychology [article]. Retrieved from https://venngage.com/blog/disney-villains/