A Work In Progress (Inventor Concept art)
This is The Inventor, the first of two characters in my senior project film "A Work in Progress." He is a man in his early to mid fifties who has been inventing out of his garage for decades. The story is set in a vaguely steampunk-inspired world full of steam power and combustion, and though we only get glimpses of the world outside the inventor's workshop, we wanted his appearance to reflect his relationship with the world outside. He dresses in sharp, practical clothes covered up by layers of protective gear, but underneath is a weary, tired man who has been scared and hurt by the world, and does his best to keep separate from it.
He is roughly 5'9" and very thin. He has frown lines around his eyes and along his cheeks. His hair is neatly gelled into a side part, and starting to show streaks of gray. An old faded shrapnel scar cuts across his left cheekbone. He has great posture when he stands up, but slouches when no one is looking. He irons his clothes every day, but a closer look would reveal oil stains and singe marks at the edges of the fabric.
The inventor was a wonderfully fun character to design, and I can't wait to show off his fully-rendered model!
The first full-body sketch ever made of the inventor. My team used this to work out the details of the inventor's outfit. He was younger in this draft, about 30. We later aged him up to his early 50s, to better capture his role as the robot's "father"
Initial facial expression references. We wanted to show that the inventor struggles with being vulnerable, and often pulls down his goggles to hide his emotions, one of the only separations between his personal life and work life.
Some pose sketches from various scenes in the story. From here on out, the inventor has an old scar on his face (often obscured by his goggles), which roughly matches the welding pattern on his robot's face.
Full turnaround of the inventor's outfit, used as a reference when modeling his clothes (which we chose to simulate using nCloth rather than hard model onto the body).
This is a slightly more simplified version of the previous image, which we used to sculpt the inventor's body and rig his model.