As with all productions, as time goes on things need to change, as our story has shifted so have our needs for the soldier. While Lawrences original sketch helped us to become inspired and created the idea for the "Rite of Passage", he unfortunately needed some changes to the design. After some talk Lawrence and I were afraid that the audience would identify with the Soldier far more than the Lascer, as would only be natural when people are presented with a creature/alien/beast/monster and a human. So in order to combat this we chose to take a page out of the George Lucas/Star wars book, that is to cover his face. Just like the Storm Troopers and just about every other grunt in the Imperial army we gave our soldier a helmet. Thus shrouding his face and making it harder for the audience to identify with the soldier. While this may not be the only thing it will take to help the audience to realize that the the Lascer is indeed the innocent and protagonist of the story, that job will have to live up to the animation and story telling.
For the modeling of this character I decided to do it all withing Maya. Due to the predominately hard surface nature of the Desert Shock Trooper (DST) because of his armor, I decided that a standard box modeling workflow would be best for the DST, keeping in mind edge flow around the armor and the extra edges to maintain the hard surface nature of the armor after being converted to SubD. I created the head as a separate piece which I than parented to the body. The complex nature of the helmet and its design did no
t mesh well with the needs of the edge flow of the rest of the body. Also the fact that a helmet comes down below the jaw line mean if will mask off part of the neck and the audience will not be able to tell there isn't actually a head or flesh beneath the helmet.
I than rigged this character much like I did the Lascer so that it could be passed off to Lawrence for animation duties. The final pose and the baton were done by Lawrence for the render below, illustrating the attitude and range of motion of the DST.
