It’s been a while!
Since the last update a new, animation-focused course has started, 3D-III. Our first assignment was to (in groups of three) create a pre-production package for a character of our choice. I work with Kim Teroni Borg (modeling main mesh and head, finalizing animations) and Nayomi Arvell (modeling of secondary parts, character background, texturing). My responsibilities for this project are concept art, rigging and skinning and blocking out the main character animations). We brainstormed and agreed that a small, exaggerated, military, napoleon-like character would be a fun and interesting challenge (when doodling I tend to draw women so an elderly man seemed like a good push out of the comfort zone). To give his macho, militaristic appereance a twist, Nayomi came up with a backstory for him about how he lost his leg and got a not quite synchronized, new one. Quick first doodle:
After agreeing on the base concept I explored basic body shapes and facial shapes:
Then after we’d agreed on a body-shape (potato on legs), I made a “character creator” (psd.file) that let you mix and match eyes, noses, facial hair, hats, jackets, shoes and robotic legs. Some mixtures below:
And then the colour palette:
Only sliightly obsessively. Spot the differences!
In the end this became our (ex-) admiral Edward “Ladyleg” Hemsworth. (The funny thing is, if you look back, the final design ended up pretty close to the original doodle throughout the iterations. It ended up very much being an ‘archetype-with-a-twist’-sort of design). In short, his character background is that he used to be an admiral in the navy so devout to his duty that he wasn’t about to let little trifles like the fall of a government and civilized society stop him from doing it. So he still wears the uniform and sticks to his values whereas his crew have taken on a more pirate-y ‘practical’ approach.
For the modeling turnaround, some adjustments were made to make him more suitable for animations. For example covering up the attachment of the leg, moving down the boot below the knee, moving up the belt and adjusting the sleeves:
The final part was planning out the rigging and the edgeflow before going into modeling the base mesh:
Next time, the base mesh, rigging, skinning and some animation poses!
Outside of the course I’ve been slowly working my way through Loomis’s “Drawing the head and hands” which I’ve found really helpful to get a better idea about facial proportions, both male and female.
eva sokolova 