'The Saga of Darren Shan' Pre-Production Work

As part of my major project in uni I decided to design, model and texture a circus environment and a character to go in it, inspired by the horror novel series 'The Saga of Darren Shan'. The character I will be creating will be a teenage snake-boy called 'Evra Von', who performed at the circus known as the ‘Cirque Du Freak’ featured throughout the books.

I chose this because it is a novel I am very familiar with; I read it many times growing up from age eight and it never ceases to amaze me. Each time I have read the books I have become re-immersed into this fascinating world of strange creatures no matter my age. The circus camp area is used as a home-base for the main characters particularly in the first few books and I wanted to interpret this small part of the magical world shown throughout the books in my own work.

I also made a basic block model of the environment to give me a better idea of layout, proportion and also to make a rough list of assets I'll need to make.

And now for the character, 'Evra' the snake-boy. I was super excited to design the scales and getting to use lots of greens and yellows. I worked from book descriptions of the character; features included scales, webbed hands and feet, thin yellow hair and shorts. I'm really looking forward to modelling him and using normal maps for the scales.