Team CHOW II: Random Team 1

[skorpi]

@mimer: Good pose but same with the feet as AhChu, let hinm turn them a little bit outward, that gives him more weight.

@LostFayth: I was writing about the vertical lines. Sice she have a nice round face you can use the face painting to give her some more accent.
I agree, she don't need much armor. And sice she's flying, she has to be light.
I think, her head is shorter than the one of the good fairy. But maybe it's just becouse their different poses.


Today i was working on the bad one. There are still some details to paint, but it's almost finished. Critic?

[skorpi]

ok, guys.
We dont need to post all chracters together, but we can. Here are the backgrounds (or the basic if someone like to add Details ore change things)
High resolution files on deviantart: background good and background evil

Feel free to use and change how you like.

And now, I start painting details. Seems like I wouldn't have a computer from tomorrow until sunday evening. But I'm sure, I can finish in time

[mimer]

love the backgrounds, might steal portions of it for a backdrop for my chars

heres an update on the baddie, stupid setback today with computer crash stealing 2,5 hours worth of work, but getting there.

[skorpi]

@mimer: Damn computers. Looks good so far, but a little stiff. Mabe you can give him a little twist, paint the shoulders not in the same hight.

[AhChu]

Okay guys here are my finals, I don't think I will be able to make any more changes as I fly out to wellington for the weekend tomorrow, but feel free to tweak them if need be. Thanks heaps Scorpi for the awesome backgrounds, the worked a charm. Hope you guys like, I would have to liked to put some more time into them but I have been sick with the flu all week I tried some new techniques out on the good ranger, which worked really well, but there was a few frustrating moments for a awhile.

Bio - Rangers are regarded a special forces unit, usually wokring in small teams or by themselves they are able to disrupt or even disband enemy armies through the use of Gorilla tactics. they don't believe in the honor of battle just what ever it takes to achieve the objective. Through their training they are trained with a personal animal and the bond they share makes the two very lethal weapons.
The Rangers that twist on over to the darker side of things are very unstable, and usually skin the faces of the fallen foes just to wear them in the following battle to unnerve their opponents.

Mimer- Ya dude is coming along nicely will be looking forward to your finals.

Skorpi - that is one bad ass teddy bear, the only crit I would say is to add a few extreme highlights and darks just to punch the image out a little more

lost Can't wait to see ya evil fairy, show me her badness I dare ya

[LostFayth]

mimer Go, go, go...it's coming together, can't wait to see the finals. I'm sorry to hear your computer b*tched, I hope you can make it.

AhChu I hope you are all better now. The portraits look great, you've outdone yourself. Can you post both characters without a background (maybe in a psd or png file) so I can put together the line up without cutting your character

Okay, another update, hope to finish it today.

EDIT:
Forgot to add the latest one.

[LostFayth]

Okay guys and gal, I finished it ^_^
I'm quite happy with both of the characters. I feel like I've grown a lot during the chow. Although I did not work completely out of my comfort zone, I think this is a good step

My finals;
Good:


Evil:


Go team!

[mimer]

just a quick post saying im still very much on track, but seriously swamped with work. update in weekend, got all of sunday off from work thankfully.

[AhChu]

Bad ranger clear cut

Good ranger clear cut

[LostFayth]

AhChu, the clean cuts don't work. They are a .bmp file and bmp doesn't support transparent pixels. Could you save it as a .png file.

EDIT Never mind, I solved it.

Aw man, just two days left

[mimer]

bad guy nearly done, and good guy coming along. hate to leave it this late for you to put the final entry together but Im afraid i wont have this finished until late afternoon on the 31st. I think ca supports attaching psdfiles, would you prefer that if its possible with the char on a separate layer to the background? size 600 by 900 pixels?

[skorpi]

I'm back
And I dee, you wer busy

@AhChu: I like the two, especially his characteristic face.

@LostFayth: Good job

@mimer: you can upload psd. files, but only light ones, I dont know, if it works without loosing quality.

LostFayth: If you dont have the time to finish the group picture tomowwor afternoon, I have. So, if there's a problem, just send me, what you have and I'll finish.
I too like to work a bit on my charactersbut I finish defently tomorrow.

[LostFayth]

Mimer, You can save it as a .png file with no background and as a jpeg with background. That will make it more easy for me to put the character in the lineup. I don't think the file size is supported by ca.org. Tomorrow afternoon should work for me.

Skorpi, Thanks for the concern. Everything will work out of you can finish it tomorrow as well. I already started saving the files with the right name and I've added AhChus and my characters to the lineup. I've also collected the stories.

I have no classes after 15.20 tomorrow. I'll check as soon as I get home and keep checking until I have everything I need for the final post. Once I have everything I'll post it up and let you guys know. It's gonna be okay.

[skorpi]

@LostFayth: Well, I'm couriaous how the alignement finally will look like

To put all together:

Gender: male
Race: Therianthroph: Human who can morph into an animal form.
Class: Warrior

Character description/ Race details: Ursos can morph into a bear and a mixform between human and bear. He can stay in each form, al long as he want. The transformation take 3 minutes. Clothes don't transform, so if he change from human to mixed form wearing clothes, they will tear.
He use to stay in human form for his allday life. Meeting with friends or at official partys. In his human form, he is like all other humans, without any special abilities.
When he's travelling in dangerous places (and thats often, since he's figthing for his people) he prefer the mixed form and wears armor. Alltime ready to fight.
In this state, he is stronger than a human, faster and better protectet trough his fur. he can't speak al well as in human forn, but good enough to say easy things. And he understands the other peaple very well.
The bear form has best senses. He can fight too, but not hold weapons or something like taht. He can't speak, but understands other people still.
He use to stay in this form only for spying.
He's a berserker. If he lose control over his anger, he automatically transform in the mixed form and begins to fight. If no enemy is around, he can atack his own people.

only the good one: Fortunally he's a cosy person. He like eating, relaxing and listen to music. But he's loyal to his people too, so he learns to fight and decided, to help as good as he can.

only the evil one: To be a berserker is a real problem for the bad-tempred Ursos. Fortunally for his people he looks like someone who should be botherd, so worst case is rare. And he use his anger to fight against the good people.

Since he's born in both "worlds" he's practically the same person, even looking the same.

File links without background: Good, Evil

Finals:

[AhChu]

Nice job Skorpi, those finals look really cool, love the strong colours, but must say the good one is my fav even if he does wear a pink belt

[mimer]

ok, finals, so sorry about the extreme lateness, couldnt be helped this month im afraid. Could not for the life of me get png files down to the right size, so i hope you can work with these jpgs with a white bg.

descriptions:
good
Amongst the orchs, the son of krath the bladeforger started hearing the whispers of the world all around him. The whisper can be shaped around a man, filling him with joy, a will to fight or a desire to live. Arath uses his flute, traditionally bladed in the way of the orchs, who are pragmatic about things like musicians on the battlefield, to rally his fellow soldiers.

evil:
In the dark mines of the excavated mountains of krath the iron forger, His son wielded heavy hammers, striking into the hearts and roots of mountains until suddenly he started hearing the pulse of the world around him. Taken in as a war drummer, Arath disrupts the pulse of the world to cause fear and panic around him, while beating his enemies down with his macelike drumbeaters.

[skorpi]

@mimer: Nice job.
the white backgrund will work, I think. Then, I' going to post the finals

Lineups:

[mimer]

great work on the final entry Man, if this taught me anything its to be way more organised in my work and keeping it on a tighter schedule. Great work everyone, that lineup looks really cool.

[LostFayth]

Ah mimer, you got me al worked up last night. I was really sleepy and tired. I pmed skorpi to make the final post and daestwen what to do if you were late. You almost gave me a heart attack xD

It's great that everything worked out!

Man it's been a killer month. I have learned a lot from you guys and the brief we all came up with was really great. Lets see what happens in the poll.

Thank you guys and gal!

(skorpi, you made some great modifications I hadn't thought of )

[skorpi]

I agree, it was an interesting month. I like working with ou guys

@LostFayth: Yeah, i took some freedom to change one of your backgrounds and change positions of the characters (what was you thinking about hiding your fairy putting her before the most unfavorble part of the background )

[AhChu]

Hey guys, even for a crazy busy month its been a blast and I think you guys did a great job, time to start cracking back onto some studies in prep for the next one stay in touch

[mimer]

yeah, sorry about that, I nearly gave myself a heartattack over the last two evenings, really kicking myself over procrastrinating like that. *goes to drool over all the cool stuff in the finals thread again*

And now of course work gives me 4 days off, like i didnt need that last week

[LostFayth]

Mimer...work can be a b*tch sometimes right? Now you have 4 days to drool over all the images.

Speaking of which...there is a lot of great competition isn't there!? :o

[skorpi]

True, there are some really great entries. So I agree with AhChu -> *going to study*

[mimer]

I was thinknig it might be a good idea to do a roundup of what we think we did well, and what areas we need to develop more in terms of this team activity?

perhaps each of us put down 3 constructive points on things were happy with, and 3 points we think we need to work more on, or could have done differently to get an even better result? I think we had a good level of constructive criticism going n the thread, and I think that having some sort of roundup now that we have the whole process to look at could be a good thing.

What do you guys think?

If we decide we want to do this, havce a deadline on, say, tuesday the 8th for posting up some final crits for the team effort as a whole?

[skorpi]

@mimer: Good idea but not so easy. I give it a try:

Positiv:
- We had a great start, searching for ideas and reference material, that was very inspiring.
- We had a good feedback culture, one of the most important paints, working in a team.
- Even if Ahchu and mimer hadn't much time, they worked hard (it was easier to finish for LostFaith and me, because we had more time) and we finally could finish the challenge. Looking at the Team list and the list of teams who finished, that's nothing selv-evident.

Negativ:
- Maybe it were better, we did a whole group meeting at mns or something like that. from the chat with LostFaith I can say, that this can be really helpful to create ideas but also to lern something about the teammember. (But of cuse I know, it's difficult to find a time everyone can join, even if Ahchu lives in really different time zone)
- maybe it was better, to start earlier with the finals. Desing precess is important, but it's also a pity, if in the end the time lacks to finish properly.
-other teams create presentation frames, looking at the final thread, that's a detail, making a group looking more homogen and loking good. So, maybe we should have thought about the final presentation earlier (but I also like the lineups, in that poit, we succseed)

[mimer]

ok, heres mine.

good: an organised start, lots of ideas and i think there was a good structure in the beginning that helped a lot.

good level of activity and constructive crits from everyone, which made the end result that much better.

we came up with two solid concepts for the two cultures and we made them shine through in our designs, that went a long way towards prsenting two groups that looked distinctive and like they belonged with eachother.

things we could improve/do differetly/add.

i agree on the chat meeting, im not adverse to odd hours as long as im free the day after, im used to holding weird hours to talk to people in other timezones anyway this could definitely be a good idea to improve the team process.

I think we can push the details, originality and wowfactor more. we had a solid base concept for both cultures, and we definitely made them both show, but we could push the details more, find those original details that make a charachter stand out and catch the eye even more.

I can mainly speak for myself here, but i defnitely ended up doing basic work to finish the broad figure, especially on the flute player, when i should have been focusing on refining details etc the last portion of the month. In short, my personal planning sucked, and not just due to time constraints. I think you lot did a much better job than me on that, but overall, if we can i think that the good planning we had in the beginning is something that we really should keep up all the way through, that way last week will feel less stressful. I know im definitely not doing a repeat on that last week if i can help it

[LostFayth]

Whoops! First deadline I missed! I was not aware of the feedback. Here is my 2 cents.

Good:
- Great team vibe. It was pleasant to work in the team because of the way we addressed each other and no one was trying to force someone else to do something.
- Everything came into a creative process from the moment we got the brief. Even before that we were thinking on how to improve the previous brief.
- Which gets me to the last point: The amount of feedback was good which resulted into a great team activity which was fun and consistent.

Need to improve:
- An important thing we missed was like you two said, the team meeting. It would have been great to get together the first time and set some important parts up right away. Which brief, who's gonna do what and how are we gonna do it, things like that. It happened anyway, but in a course of a week. A lot of time went away. It's also what skorpi said, because of the frequent chats we had I get the feeling our characters grew together. The four characters of our team do fit, but I see overlap with our two characters. It's something we should pay attention to next time. (That was point two )
- Next time we should pay more attention to our personal schedule. Who has a lot of time, who doesn't and divide the tasks according to that.


But guys, it's not only about putting the good and the less good parts down. It's also important to think HOW we're gonna improve.

- We have to work something out for the first chat. I know AhChu and skorpi use yahoo to chat and I have msn, so maybe we could use those instant messengers to get together at a time which is suitable in this timezone and AhChus timezone.
- Maybe it's also fun to experiment with passing a character around. So we have at least touched one character as a team. If it works we could do it for every character.
- We have to look at personal schedules and plan to start on finals sooner.
- Besides coming up with concepts for the characters within a brief we also should start thinking about presentation methods from the get-go.

I guess that about covers it. Great to be a part of this team