Mad Hatter Week 8 Progress

The Mad Hatter is one of my biggest contributions to this project from my side. I will be working on this by myself right from the conceptual phase until the very completion. This is so that I can focus on enhancing my modeling skills, texturing and possibly experiment with a facial rig.

Our initial idea was to have a very stylized art style running through the project. For the Mad Hatter we decided as a team to create a stylized look. I was inspired by this stylized image of a concept art done by Jenny Harder, a concept and character artist on Artstation.

I wanted to go with a style like this while adding my own touch to it. Therefore these were the concepts I drew for the character. I experimented with texture/makeup variations of the Mad Hatter by transforming his overall look into IT or the JOKER. Our idea was also to have three expressions of the Mad hatter that pop up as heads from the ground with three different textures: Mad Hatter, IT and the JOKER - but I personally think that’ll be way too much. The ending will have a wacky expression of the rollercoaster going into the Mad Hatter’s mouth which triggers the character to wake up.

Hence I began working on the sculpt in Zbrush from Week 5 onwards, after getting the RETRO scene out of the way. These were my initial sculpts.

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After a thorough assessment by my lecturer, he advised me to use real life references of the character. So I based my new sculpt on the actual Johnny Depp character.

He advised me to follow the actual design of Johnny Depp’s face and to nail it precisely. The stylized look can be done afterwards through flattening the planes on the face to give it that smoothened look. That’s when I worked around his feedback to create the same features as the older Johnny Depp on the Sculpt

These were my improvements.

In order to build better and more realistic details into my character, I will have to research more on form, figure and proportions. From what I found of the differences in the male and female skulls, there is a stark contrast in the way the features of males and females project. This is not something I knew beforehand and was briefly discussed during one of the sculpting club sessions on facial anatomy.

The major differences are that the male forehead is narrower, the eyebrow ridge is thicker and more prominent, the cheek bones are much larger and lower, and the chin is wider than females. Although this video explains the differences in a more scientific and technical way, I pinned the differences that were needed to portray in my sculpt. Moreover, from the references of Johnny Depp, I can see theses features very clearly.

Here are a few more images that outline other facial proportions that I need to keep in mind while refining the character. The spacing between the eyes need to be maintained, the measurements and breakdowns from the front and side views should also be taken into account.

I still have a long way to go. After the facial rig class, I was overwhelmed with the stress of completing this on time! Hence, I made a personalized character workflow chart:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3GvTnCuOIY