Narrative - Character Walk Cycle

Now that we have a fully working character, I have started experimenting with animating a walk cycle.

Narrative - Skinning and Rigging the Character

For our character I decided to make the Ribbon Spine, to allow more movement. I then built the skeleton and used Smooth Bind to attach it to the mesh. Using both the paint weights tool and the component editor, I adjusted the influences of the joints on each piece of the mesh until I had the character fully working.

After skinning the character I created all of the controls. I have now finished rigging and skinning the character.

I used joints to rig the eyebrows and blend shapes to add expressions to the face.

Narrative - UV Mapping the Character

Here is the character with all of the UV maps laid out, ready to be textured.

Character Design - Silhouettes Exercise

In last weeks class we looked at the importance of a distinctive silhouette. I was given Neanderthals as a theme and asked to design characters whose silhouettes would show this.

Character Design - Hero and Villain Development

To begin with I sketched some body types and poses to start getting the feel of my hero and villain. My hero is meant to be a mechanic/inventor so therefore needs to look average but at the same time it needs to be believable that he could take on the villain (Villain - left, Hero - centre and right). At this stage the figures seem quite generic and the villain in particular, due to his transformation, needs developing to give a more interesting silhouette.

As my villain goes through a massive physical transformation, I have been sketching different body types and poses for different stages of his development. I have tried to experiment with the idea of him replacing body parts with machinery, as well as him building robotics around his body to enhance it. Overall I want him to be very unsymmetrical to help show that his transformation is destroying his human body.

To see which of my initial sketches has the boldest shape, I experimented with turning them into silhouettes.

Character Design - Story Outline

Genre: Robots and Dystopian

Theme: Truth

3002. 800 years after humanity was nearly wiped out by war, the world is a seemingly peaceful place.

Prior to the story, the hero was working at the villains company. He is a technician, working on inventing better and stronger technology. He finds out that the villain has been using the technology he has created to make an army of robots and turn himself into a super-human cyborg. Before his transformation began, the villain acted as a mentor to the hero, guiding and pushing him to succeed in his inventions. The hero realises that the villain has been manipulating him all along. After escaping the robots he meets the sidekick, a prototype robot, who himself is on the run as he is faulty and doesn't want to be dismantled for parts. The hero initially wants to run and forget what he knows but the guilt over his creations being used to start a war sets him on his journey to stop the villain.

The hero later realises that the villain is one of many biding their time in this peaceful society, waiting for the perfect moment to rise up and take over, bringing back a world of dictatorship and war.

Modelling the Viking

 

Character Design - Class Exercises

In our first class I was randomly given the genres mutant and pirate and asked to quickly design a character.

During our next class we looked at the shapes that make up characters. This exercise involved taking a character, identifying the shapes within the design and changing them.

For the next task I took an image of Disney's Scar and drew him in a more iconic style.

I was given the environment of a music room and asked to design Anthropomorphic characters using objects that would be found within the space.

Our next exercise was to design a character as a prop, still maintaining the feel of the character. I chose Tigger and designed him as a pogo stick.

Our next lesson focused on understanding the anatomy of male and female characters. I took the character Gru from Despicable Me and focused on the structure of his body. I think the centre image was the most successful. The left image is my interpretation of Gru as a female character.

Next we used structure to change the character. First I designed an overweight Gru, followed by a child-like version of the character. Then we were asked to experiment with completely changing the style of the character.