Week 3

Character design

Renard, star of the Statetown Circus!

I decided to create a slightly different character from 'Prince Charming' as i thought this had been used a lot. i wanted a character who would have the same charisma and features. the first thing that came to mind was a celebrity, and i then decided on a gymnast character as the body shape fit this role. i used features from research in week 2, for example the large jaw and posing. i added a curled moustache to show the characters European heritage in a stereotypical way. this type of moustache also fits in with the stereotype of old gymnasts and body builders, making a recognisable character for the young audience.

Above: an 'old fashioned' weightlifter.

One pose i drew above shows 'Renard' standing tall and looking very proud. this was to show his pride in his work, and his love for impressing his fans.

this second set of poses show some more actions, including swinging and landing from a jump. these are the sort of actions the character would be doing.

the next step was to draw the character up in neat from the front and side. the images were drawn on squared paper to ensure they lined up and proportions were stuck to.

the character was drawn in a neutral pose to help with the rigging process.

Modelling

after setting up the scene like in the week 1 hand reference, the modelling was started.

plane modelling was chosen as the best method for creating the mesh, as it gives the most flexibility.

a good place to start modelling is around the eyes, so a plane was placed beneath the eye and extruded out and around multiple times. a symmetry modifier is added to the plane and the mirror placed at the centre of the reference image, so that only one half needs to be modelled. the mesh also welds at the mirror, or seam, which helps join the two halves.

the eyes in the image above are actually flipped the wrong way round the z axis. this was fixed later on.

the next step was to create the mouth, using the same method as the eyes. when the mouth was completed, it was attached to the eyes using the attach button in the edit geometry roll-out. this turns the two objects into one object.

the first image shows the setup in the 4 view ports.

once the mouth was completed the jaw could modelled, by extruding down all the edges along the bottom of the mouth. at the bottom of the chin the edges were rotated to create the curved surface.

the mouth and eyes were the joined together by using the bridge and weld buttons. bridge creates a face between two or more selected edges, and weld joins two vertices into one. these are both useful tools for connecting, but weld is better for keeping the polygon count lower.

Week 2

I watched some cartoons and collected some images and videos that show a strong sense of character. the character i have decided to make is a 'handsome prince' style character. therefore he needs to be confident and in good shape, but also slightly clumsy because of his vanity.

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

Week 1

This week I practised box modelling a simple hand. box modelling uses extrusion to build up a shape by extruding faces.

to create a better model a reference image is very useful. to set up a reference image the images were added as materials to two perpendicular planes.

I used a box primitive to create the hand, by selecting faces and extruding them to follow the shape of the hand image. the cut tool was used to add extra faces around the knuckles. I then added a 'skin' material and smoothed the mesh using the MSmooth tool.

below is a render without smoothing.

here is the final render with smoothing used.