Beastman Concept

As the title suggests this is one of the early concepts for the head of my beastman character's head. I wanted to create a character from a fantasy humanoid race, with influence drawn from things such as Greek Minotaurs and Blizzard's Tauren. I wanted them to be a hardy nomadic race, hailing from a harsh mountain territory, with a strong warrior culture. For the character I was designing I wanted him to be a male who had just entered adulthood. I liked the idea of him being rebellious character who stood up against the ways of the tribe and eventually left, or was exiled. With this in mind I things associated with various punk movements into account when designing the character.

In this concept I established some shapes I really like, particularly the long face and the way the eye socket and cheekbones are positioned. In using very human features it is easy for an audience to understand the character, they subconsciously know when to look for signs of emotion (ie eyes and mouth). More abstract creature designs can run into problems if this isn't the case. I looked at a lot of reference from various different animals from goats, cows, bulls to gorillas.

As a result I had a lot of ideas of how horns could be integrated with the character which I explore in a later concept. I liked the long metal head hair, but it would be tricky to sculpt/pose without using real time hair simulations such as apex and because this wasn't really the focus of the work I'm doing I thought I would use future concepts to experiment with hair styles. The next area I wanted to experiment with was the ears, whilst these goat style ears work quite well I wasn't weather a slightly abstracted human ear might work better.