And Then It Hit Me

Briefly before going to bed I stopped to ponder on an alternative look, or possibly alternative class all together, seeing as the Operative really wasn't fitting it. I then began to think what else would someone who's not wanting to be noticed would wear, high collared coat, hat, possibly sun glasses, and I began to ponder we're I've seen that look before that would be seen amongst shady characters. And then it hit me.

The Mafia..

Maybe not strictly the Mafia, but a similar sort of looking shady character carrying a violin case with a Tommy gun inside it, or possibly even another deadly weapon concealed in his large coat. Furthermore this character fits in with the rest of the Team Fortress 2 family miles better than the Operative did with his otherworldly weapons, gadgets and tactics. Additionally he doesn't necessarily need to be in the Mafia, he could be in some other organised crime agency, or even an undercover cop from the 50s.

Additional Research

Having created the Operative class, and reviewed how his placement within the Team Fortress 2 family wouldn't be very strong or even believable due ti the fact that he stands out quite a bit from the other classes, I have taken another look at the appearances of the Team Fortress characters and looked at how casual they appear in-game.

 

Ultimately Team Fortress 2 is a brutal and violent game with people being blown to bits, but it is still very light hearted and this is mostly due to the way they move, play, die and appear to other players, and were the Operative class be introduced to Team Fortress 2 for real, there would be an uproar from Team Fortress 2 fans as he would not fit in. Therefore a redesign is in order.

Also my modelling skills have improved significantly since the start of the year and have made a very convincing monster model, which I'm very proud of.

Character - Further Designs

After looking at the classes within Team Fortress 2 to see of there is a role not yet fulfilled within the game the best I could see was an agressive stealth class. There is ofcourse the Spy which is a more of a hit and run class by backstabbing an opponent and then running for the hills before disguising themselves and going in once again.

And so the Operative Class was born.

I wanted a harrassment class who's role would be to sneak behind enemy lines and ambush the enemy team's reinforcements with traps, mines and silenced weapons.

The main inspiration ebhind this class was from Tom Clancey's Splinter Cell series as although the agents are stealthy they can also be quite deadly.

Of course I didnt want them to be overpowered or indeed seem powerful and so I kept their physique rather thin to hint that they are quite fragile and rely more heavily on their gadgets and traps than their brute strength to win fights.

Character - Initial Designs

After looking at some Team Fortress 2 styled characters I begun to think which character or even class character I would like. My initial thoughts were to stick with simple ideas like a tall and skinny character or a short and fat characters. However the problem with this is that both these characters have already been donein the form of the Sniper and the Heavy.

So instead I think I will create a hybrid class and try to find a niche in the Team Fortress so that my character may fulfill a role.

Chair

Here is a rather complex chair that I created. It was surprisingly tricky, although I think this is more of due to the way in which I made the chair but rather than restarting and making the chair in a different and better method method. Which I really shouldn't do and will not do again.

 

Above is the refined chair after I had taken care of some of the minor faults. 

And then here are some of the flaws from the old chair.

  So I am going to avoid  having unseen faces as it makes the image more complicated than it has to be  and would also create problems if I were going animate or bend the object.

 Whereas here the problem here is that I wasn't connecting edges together however I was only connecting the edges where I needed them which lead to my edges looking really messy and my hidden edges to be completely messed up. Which although it didn't make too much of a mess for the chair, however were I to have a curved object then the object would be completely ruined.

Fish

Here is my trout that I created using planes as guidelines as they had been textured with an outline and so I had a cross-section of a trout to work from. I found this method very helpful as it meant I was able to easily make sure I created something that looked like a trout and it also aided in keeping things proportionate.

Banana

I am really really happy with the way this has turned out. I am really proud of how it looks, cause it actually looks like a banana. Adding a texture on to it really did make this look good in my opinion  and it really makes it stand out from the rest of my work. It also demonstrated how useful lofts can be in creating pipes or other objects that would repeat themselves.