the first character that came to mind was 'Prince Charming' from the Shrek (Dreamworks, 2001) series.
Shrek is 3D so this is even more helpful. his type of character is obvious even from this still image; he has an arrogant smile and raised eyebrow, and also a well groomed hairstyle. some elements of this character are what i am looking for but not all. the human characters in Shrek are very realistic in proportions and i would like a more cartoony look.
the next character i looked at was Johnny Bravo (Partible, 1997). he is a 2d character but has a huge amount of character.
the still image doesn't capture the whole style so i found a video clip. this clip is the intro to the cartoon.
Johnny Bravo is extremely vain and loves to show off his physique and check out his flamboyant hairstyle. his movements convey this through lots of 'flexing' and generally posing a lot to show his confidence, as if he owns the stage. as with lots of vain characters he does have a clumsy or stupid side, which is shown by him getting rejected by the woman at the end, where he ends up on the floor in a heap. he maybe relies on his looks too much, where a more evil character may be slightly smarter.
the shape of his body is great in showing his superior strength, by giving him small legs and a large upper body. this 'upside down triangle' shape would be great for my character.
the final character i found was Stan from American Dad (MacFarlane, 2005). i chose Stan for his extremely chiselled jaw, which uses a lot of exaggeration, a classic cartoon technique.
Modelling practice
I practised modelling Johnny Bravo's head using two different modelling styles.
the first style i tried was modelling with a cube with a spherify modifier attached. the spherify modifier smooths out the cube and removes the sharp corners. it is better to use this method than modelling with a sphere prefab as there is more control over how many faces the shape has, and how equally spaced they are.
This technique is difficult to use as it is hard to select the right sections of the mesh to move around without affecting others. there are too many faces in some areas and not enough in others, as at the start there are equal amounts of faces. areas like the eyes need more faces however which means they must be created using the cut tool. spherify also clashes with the smoothing groups, which messes up the shading in some areas.
some tools i used with this method were the bevel tool and the chamfer tool. bevel was used to extrude and then taper the ear shape out from the face. the chamfer tool was used to add extra rings at the eyes, by selecting an edge which creates two new edges.
the second method i tried was the box modelling method. this uses a cube shape, which can then be edited to fit the shape of the face by moving the vertices around.
this method is a lot more useful as it can be customised much easier by adding new vertices and changing the amount of faces in each dimension of the shape. secondly the mirror or symmetry modifiers can be used so that only half the face has to be modelled. this is very useful as it makes sure both sides of the character are the same (as long as this is desired).
i found the best way to use this method was to line up the horizontal lines with the facial features (eyes, nose, mouth) and then move the vertices into the shape of these features e.g moving the vertices around the nose inwards to create the bridge. new faces can be made easily by using the shift + drag extrude, and new faces created within the model by using the connect tool after selecting edges. the object must be an editable poly to use this tool.
Shrek. 2001. [Film] Directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson. USA: Dreamworks
Johnny Bravo, 1997. [Cartoon] Cartoon Network
American Dad!, 2005. [Cartoon] Fox
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