Character Assignment

Part of our course for this semester requires us to take a character through a full development process, from 2D concept art, turnaround and model sheet as well as a storyboard and animatic before we take the character into 3D and create a model that can be rigged and posed. I had originally planned to use the character I'm going to use for my final Project but since she is going to be low poly and not have a lot of detail, this assignment seemed like a good chance to try something different.

My plan now is to use a character I've had in the back of my mind for a few years... more like 6 years. The Dragon Walker. She's a fantasy character with strong links to dragons and magic and has a tribal feel to her. So I started out with my inspiration board.

I love the style of Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Moana and Fable: The Journey artwork. So I pulled all of these references and ideas together to help me design my character.

I went through several different sketches of what my character would wear before I settled on this.

I liked the basic shapes of this design and especially the tattoos. I took to Photoshop to add some colour and see what combinations I liked best.

After I found the colours I liked, I noticed that there were some issues with with the body shapes not matching between both pencil sketches for front and back so I tidied everything up a little in Photoshop and added the colour again.

In hindsight, I feel like I need to push the shapes more but I'll come back to that later. I then started to play about with different faces, skull shapes, and thumbnail some poses of what this character might do.

Now I'm going to go back and work on the model sheet now that I know who my character is and what she looks like as well as produce some concept art of her in motion, starting with this piece (which still needs coloured)

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Cure - Advanced Skeleton 5

I spent a fair chunk of the day yesterday playing around with Advanced Skeleton 5 in Maya and honestly, it's amazing. I wasn't sure how well it would work with my model because it is so low poly but I came out surprisingly well. So Advanced Skeleton gives you the joints from a template and once they're all lined up you can build the controllers to see how it will move. Because you do all of this in stages, you can change and update the rig at any point. There are a few different methods to bind the skin and this is one of them, but in the end I didn't use the Skin Cage because it didn't seem necessary for my model. Once the body rig was done I spent a LONG time trying to get the facial rig to work. I was clearly doing something wrong the first few times I tried it because it worked just fine when I sat down and worked through it step by step! The skeleton also comes with pre-made walk cycles so I put my character into these to see how the de...

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Dragon Bait and Animate

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