Week 1: Initial Character Designs and Modelling

Character Designs:

The brief given was to design a character but I decided to concentrate on more creature designs with more of a photo-real line of development as I wish to specialise my skill for the VFX industry.

I started the process by doing doodles and sketches of weird characters, the rabbit/ bison was developed form a dream.

I decided to explore some designs based on a clay model I made during my A levels, a gargolye with a lion bat mix. I drew some scetches and then completed some concept art in photoshop to explore the charater and it's enviroment further.

Concept Art Development:

Basic Sketch and Composition:

Colour, Lighting and Detail:

Finished Concept:

I was quite pleased with this potential character and it's enviroment circleing around the theme of old churches and gargoyles. I decided to take the design process further exploring fur, feather and scales and looking at lion skulls to produce an odd face design (last sketch).

Concept Design:

Basic Sketch and Composition:

Colour and Detail:

Final Concept:

Feed back:

The feed back received form the lion creature designs were that the drawing was good but the creature lacked character. I agree with this criticism and looking back on the designs find them too generic, lacking allure and offers little in character back history/ story. For the next stage of the project I will start form starch and complete character doodles on large pieces of paper to allow my ideas to flow more freely. 

French Roast:

To help our understanding of character design and development we were shown the animated short french roast. The story was completed in one sweeping camera move which moved back and forth following the characters in a simple environment. The character designs where made up of very basic shapes, very rectangular for the antagonistic characters and more round for the softer less threatening individuals. 

These sketches are of my designs of those characters reshaped. the one which I feel reveals the most character is the police man. Although it still follows the round shape of the character in the short I felt that the pose best reflected the nature of the individual. 

Modelling Bee:

For modeling practice I deciede to build a simple charcter for an animation project outside of the course. The character is a simple bee, essentaly a elongated sphere with wings, anteni and a pair of big googley eyes.

I started the modleing process using image planes as refecenrce and modleing in smooth shader I crated the maib shape of the body by shaping a cube. Of course the cube was cut in half and snapped the the grid so mirrioring could take place later.

After shaping the body I applyed the smooth tool adding geonmarty so that I could start extruding and shaping wings off the back. 

To create the feet I wanted to avoid extruding and shaping the geonmarty because I wanted a smooth and tidy curve. To create the shape I used a mtion path and used a surface extrude along with the help of  a couple of tutorials. These were very useful to learn time saving work stratgies which create clean and controlable geonmarty.

For the antenna I didn't use this strategy as they were not going to be mirrored exactly on either side of the model and I wanted a more organic shape where as for the legs I wanted to have very neat and uniformed shapes. For the anti I used a mix of extruding and stretching the geometry before adding an edge loop to give it more shape.

Final Bee with Wireframe Mesh:

Over all the model looks like the design and pleased the client. The geometry is tidy and although is simple I feel it has good topology with good flow lines. I learnt some good techniques in terms of motion paths and shaping techniques which will be very useful in creating more complex geometry  quickly both organic or mechanical.