RUST ~Final Major Project~ Finalized Idea

With the draft of my brief now written up and outlined for my FMP I have a clear indication of what I want to achieve, from my initial idea proposal. After receiving feedback, I decided to focus on the three main characters as my final outcome and to just focus on designing and modelling three really strong robot designs, as it was felt that if i create the human child character alongside the robots it may detract from their design and style.... I still really like the idea of the human child travelling alongside the robots, but in terms of the final outcome for this project i agree that it will be tricky to maintain the strong look I want to depict as well as maintain a steady workflow, creating a human with organic shapes in the middle of the roster of robot characters would be a bit jarring and may not fit in as I originally intended. 

The main bulk load of the project work will be focused on creating really nice 2D illustration and character design work for my portfolio, with the end result being three fully rigged robot characters with LoD's, with a presentation environment and maybe additional props. In terms of tech budgets for this project, I did a lot of research into current gen character limits, and they vary from 15,000 to 40,000 depending on the complexity and style of game (games such as Uncharted obviously are at the high end of the spectrum). Looking at the Ratchet and clank games as a good base point for research, as I'm making my characters stylized in a similar fashion, I came to the number of 20,000 as a max tri count. This will give me enough room to experiment, as well as to cover myself. I want it to be stylized, but not at the expense of detail. For the texture budget for each character I went for an estimate of 1 x1024 diffuse for the head, and 1 x2048 for the body with normal's, specs , etc where applicable. It took me awhile to decide on this and I'm still unsure, but In the past when i created characters I've struggled to create really nice diffuse maps under tight budgets so didn't want my meshes to suffer by placing tighter constraints on myself. 

I outlined the full brief in detail in the actual document itself, so wont go into every detail here. However one of the things I spent awhile doing was to outline each of the three characters based on the initial idea's I have for them at this stage, in terms of what sort of characters and archetypal categories they fit into. This fleshes out the characters and sets a good platform for me to begin my design work on.
Over the coming weeks, and over the holidays I'm looking at several sources of research in the forms of Movie's, games and Documentaries, as well as several artbooks that focus on character art and creation. I'm planning on analyzing each movie, and chronicling how it relates and acts as inspiration to my own project on here so keep an eye out for that. :)