The art of King’s Quest has undergone a sea change in the last few years. It doesn’t even look like the same game compared to its earlier years.
Taking the art style as an example, after interviewing Steve, the art director of Glory of Kings last year, I found out that ‘Eastern aesthetics’ is becoming a big part of their design direction, and has given the game an extra subtle touch of premium.

It is cut in a form that mimics the Buddhist shawl robe, but is more artistically worked into a bow-like shape; the texture of the skirt is a common Tang Dynasty bar pattern, but in a more modern short skirt; it also incorporates the fluttering ribbons and cloud patterns common in Dunhuang Buddha images.

Chinese culture has a history of thousands of years and the aesthetic sense varies from dynasty to dynasty. Due to our work, we read more content from the Tang Dynasty, but I also like the aesthetics of the Song Dynasty, which preferred a lighter palette and would be more simple and plain for comfort.

Aesthetics change according to the stage of social development. When the economy was just developing, the most popular style of decoration was the courtly style, with Roman columns and plastered ceilings. People were not admiring European culture, but they thought they were ornate and could symbolise that they were no longer poor.

Adolescent anxiety is common to all, and this should make for a character trait of a Yoder hero. But surely, the lovesick lazy adolescent bear is prone to appear flat and one-dimensional; real people tend to be more complex. Vex is even more complex. Not only is she melancholy and gloomy, she is aloof. The design team also had to say more with this expressing something more.

When concept illustrator Gem “Lonewingy” Lim first started thinking about Vex’s physical appearance, she had to consider more than just how dark the Yodel wears. How dark the clothes had to be. She wanted to empower sub Vex with an outlet for her emotions. With so many misanthropic high-fashion faced adolescent girls spread out on the table, the The conceptual illustration of “two big hands” stands out. Vygus keeps the cold, iron-faced gothic But at the same time, the two large hands betray her true feelings. So here’s the thing: Vex is a mage, not a warrior.

This direction is risky because it doesn’t convey the feel of mage play as it should. So this direction wasn’t for her. This meant that we needed another way for Vex to express herself. Fortunately, there was another concept design that stood out during the initial concept rollout phase. “A puppet manipulator who manipulates black clay free children.” But the design team raised questions such as “Where did the rabbit come from? Why does this aloof and aloof person have a pet?” The answer is that maybe they’re not just pets. Maybe they’re something. Maybe they’ve been part of her since the beginning.
What the design team really liked was not the black clay exemptions, but what they represented. So Vex’ skill set shifts to a field control mage (a point will be expanded on later), and the direction of her visual design shifted along with it. It was at this point that “Black Shadow” was born.

sketchfab link: https://skfb.ly/ouL7K

Chracter Reference

Character setting： Scarlet Witch

Scarlet Witch is an American Marvel Comics superhero who first appeared in X-Men #4 (March 1964) and made her film debut in the end credits of Captain America 2.
She made her film debut in the end credits of Captain America 2, as a result of Hydra’s experiments with the Mind Gem. There are many versions of her origin story, the most recent in the comics being that she was born to the gypsy Django and Mary, the Scarlet
The Witch’s main power is the use of Chaos Magic, an ability given to her at birth by the Demon Lord Chthon (sealed in the Wandag Mountains). In the movie “The Revenant 3/4” she
In the movie “The Revenant 3/4” she can even take on the Exterminators alone, which shows how powerful she is.

character setting: The Baron himself is a ceramic cat who takes on the identity of the head of the cat firm, whose real name is Fobelu von Gikkinken, a great swordsman and a very gentleman.

I started by establishing some basic information and personal characteristics of the character. After that, I searched the website for photos of “witches” and photos of black cats. Next I found out about other people’s character designs for cats and witches.

I drew a number of character designs for the cats, which are positioned as assassins, doctors, mages and inventors.

The character’s name is Regina and she is a humanoid black cat with different coloured pupils. She was born in a medieval magical world where every creature strives to learn magic in order to become an excellent wizard. She was a talented young girl who excelled as a student. At the age of 16, she was broken into the magical clan and is now a junior witch. Her personality is introverted and calm as well as withdrawn. But she is shrewd and capable, does not panic when things go wrong and is extremely selfdisciplined.Her current day job is in the magical clan community and the large scroll she carriesis a tool to keep track of her files as well as to facilitate her errands. She is also a soothsayer and she can use her magic crystal ball to foretell future events.

For the first rendering, I used maya mapping with a theme colour of solid wood reddish brown as well as pale yellow. The whole is the same colour and the pattern is sculpted in zbrush. However, the overall effect was too homogeneous, so I did a second rendering in Substance Painter. Finally, the textures and normals were imported into Maya.

At the beginning, I came up with 3 ideas. The first was a bamboo washing machine, a square human powered washing machine made of bamboo. The second was a sundial watch, which is based on the same principle as a sundial, where the sunlight shines and the time is determined according to the angle of the shine. The third is the jade drinking fountain, the whole of which is made of wood, while the jade inside is what purifies the water.

So I opted for a second idea, the sundial watch. However, due to some of its limitations, it can only be used in daylight and requires some skill to tell the time, not applicable to most people, so it was discarded. I came up with another idea, a VR headset that would allow me to watch animations.

And then I thought about the mindmap about the animation VR headset for the Function, period and appearance.I took the shape of VR glasses and the principle of clip books, and it become a stop-motion glasses. This VR animator is used for leisure and entertainment. The users can rotate the paper in the glasses by turning the rotating lever next to it, so as the principle of clip books and watch the animation.

https://artslondon.padlet.org/ywang022020171/75d68s9pop59pp1b

And then, I searched some information about the history of VR, the flipbook animation, some elements of Tang Dynasty and so on.

I also visited the British Museum and took some photos of the gadgets that relate to my work, such as the jade, carvings and golden texture.

Finally, I drew up what I imagined the animated VR headset would look like and a schematic of the middle. It has the overall appearance of a one-piece wooden helmet structure. A metal lever is installed next to it and shaking the lever turns the paper with the drawing in the middle, thus creating an animation.

For the first week, I try to build a rocket after the Maya class, and then add the lighting the texture. during the process, I learned some basic skills and it enhances me to build my retro device.

For the second week, the tutor teach us the skills of Maya through building a Legoman. It gave me a better understanding of Maya. At the same time, I try to build the mode of my retro device by using the simple shapes.

Obviously, it looks a little rough. Then I modeled and sculpted it in more detail the following week. In order to solve the problem of ” we can see the structure of the page-turning books inside the glasses”, I dealt with the hollow part of the front glasses. I made two versions, one is multiple hollow, the other is regular cuboid hollow. I ended up with a second, simpler version.

Animation Research

In the Rotation courses, we learned about Jan Svankmjor. We watched a lot of his animation, among which his clay animation left a deep impression on us. Therefore, we initially planned to try claymation. But after the experiment, we found it difficult to control the body movements of clay characters. In our expectation, we needed a lot of body movements of characters, so we changed our idea and tried paper-cut animation.

After denying the way of using claymation to create animation, we began to think about trying to use paper-cut animation. At first, we were attracted to the elaborate construction Rose House. In this animation, its scenes are composed of foreground, middle and back scenes, which adds a sense of space to the picture. Although all the objects in the animation are 2D paper-cuts, the creator adds a three-dimensional sense to the picture by changing the front and back positions of the objects and different shooting angles.( For example, at 1:20, the sense of the characters enter the door, and at 1:40, the layout of the living room.) At the same time, we also noticed that in this film, the characters do not have facial expressions, which makes the audience pay more attention to the body language of the characters and the content of the story.

When we showed the first animatic, our tutor Luca introduced this animation to us. It is a children’s animation, in line with our animation style. We noticed that the artist does not use a single color to deal with the colors of characters, objects and backgrounds. Instead, he uses the strokes of the brush to add texture effects and enrich the picture. In contrast to “Rose House”, the whole picture is stacked to present the sense of space. What interests us is that the animator sets up the communication between insects through the waving of wings and tentacles without too much facial expression.

Sound Research

Physical and environmental sound are used respectively in these two animations. For instance, in “Bottle”, the place where the two characters are locate is the real seaside, so the creator adopts the real sound of sea breeze and waves in the whole animation. In “Going Fishing”, the environment is a closed space, so the artist adds ambient sound according to the needs of the animation in order to make the audience know the environment of the animation. For example, he adds ambient music of bird calls that the audience could take themselves into the forest environment.

This is our first version storyboard.

In the autumn morning, the elves in the corn forest got up early and started painting. After a hard day, night fell, and in the corner of the corn forest where no one noticed, a bug that deliberately wanted to eat the elf was climbing up. A new day has arrived, and an elf is about to go out to work. At the moment the door was opened, a bug fell. The eyes were facing each other, at the moment when the worm was about to eat the elf, a black shadow shrouded over and accompanied by the sound of babble, the smell of medicine emanating. The insect was killed by the medicine and landed on the grass. The painting work of the elf is back to normal again.

Character desigh

Firstly, we drew the draft of the “corn’s fairies”, and then add the color on it via Procreate. We also used the clay to create it. And the final picture is the paper-cut character.

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And then, we drew lots of sketches of the corn’s forest. According to it, we made the paper cuts of forest.

We use the potential audio recorder to record the sound as well, and it is a big challenge and a new experience for us.

The topic I choose is body shaming. Nowadays, many people are anxious about their appearance and body. This phenomenon raises many problems. For example, malnutrition caused by weight loss, or mental depression, or even suicide. Body Shaming also plagues me. I’m not overweight, but I feel anxious and feel inferior when I see the girls with great bodies on the Internet. So I created this animation to reflect my feelings about this phenomenon.

At first, I made a list of words related to body shaming. Among the words listed, I choose “online comparisons” and “fat” as the main idea of this animation. As different countries have different aesthetics, and in China, the trend is that the thinner the girl, the better she looks. Therefore, my entire animation is about obesity.

Next, I drew some of the main elements needed in the animation, including characters and scene transactions. Finally, I drew the storyboard.