More Characters: Snake and Ball

After last class, I have been looking at different poses on Maya to better understand my characters and how they would be posed.

In addition to my previous characters, I have been creating a snake-like character in my sketches to draw. What makes this character special is that he has no legs and more feathery "hands" compared to the others. These actually function as wings, and let him fly around. Choosing clothing that doesn't restrict his wings is key.

The other character is more simple in his design, but has two large eyes on his face. While its easy to draw him, I try to keep him just as expressionite as the others by using his eyes. He makes me think about how characters express themselves with different emotions, and how eyes play a part in it.

Sketching Characters: Frog and Dog

Much like last semester, we took time to sketch out our characters with a live model posing for us. I liked drawing my character, and this gave me the perfect opportunity to figure out his body structure and physical traits.

My character is a humanoid frog with a very thin physique, mostly in his limbs. The trickiest part of drawing him initially was his eyes, since a frog's eyes are much larger than say a dog's eyes, and they aren't contained by the skull. As I draw him more, I learned how big to make the eyes compared to the size of the head.

Another issue was how to make his pupils within the eyes. As class started, I made them look connected to the bottom of his eye as well as the top, much like in the picture above. But as class went on, I realized that I limited his sight range and expressions because his pupils were too rigid. I eventually fixed it by making his pupils smaller, giving him more expressions.

Since this is the first animal character I made with pants, as he has no fur to cover himself, it made me think about my other character Domino in terms of design. Seeing the two next to each other made Domino seem a lot more...bare. Why does the frog need pants and Domino doesn't? Is it because of the fur? It gives me a lot more thought into the characters, and gave me potential ideas to edit their looks further.

Creating Characters

All this week I've been thinking on and trying to create characters that I can use tonight for motion-related poses and stances. More specifically, I've been building on the characters I've had from the previous version of this class.

The frog and the snake characters are gonna be my focus for tonight's class, as well as my other character Domino, for the sake of keeping his structure fresh in my head.

Animating A Character

Animating a character has its own techniques and strategies depending on just what kind of light you want the character to be seen in. My model was a fox and I made him look more cartoon-y than realistic because of his squashing and stretching.

The character is scared, and I have him exaggeratedly flailing his arms and jumping off of the ground in response to something frightening. I made sure to put extra attention to his ears, folding them when something was wrong and bringing them up when alert.

The tail doesn't have any bones in it, its just a long piece of fur. So I had it as loose as possible in the beginning, but made it become rigid when he became scared, like many animal characters in cartoons. I had fun playing with the eyes and mouth of the character as well, making sure to set the key points for both throughout.