Leanne
Stone
designing a character
NAME- Dev
STRENGTH- Sneaky and mysterious. Uses tactical thinking rather than strength to belittle enemies.
FLAW- Easily distracted, rain means he will hide away.
My design shows a basic design for Dev. At first my character has very similar proportions for all his body parts so I decided to lengthen his legs and make his neck longer as you can see in the second close up. I may also make his wings a lot bigger, not only will this exaggerate his bird features but will also give his something he can hide behind adding ti what animations I can do. He had a detective like hat to emphasise his agent like personality. I gave him sharper features to show the danger surrounding this character. I will draw him digitally and add colour next.
Progression
The shape I have focused on using is a triangle, this is to make a dangerous feel to my character, adding sharp lines to create a mysterious appeal. When looking at my characters silhouette the most distinctive features of my character are the hat, and the longer legs of the character. I also think the big wings of Dev are quite recognisable. I am pleased with the overall design of my character as it is something different. I like that I've given myself a sly, strict personality to work with and also a lot of limbs to work with. I can both make Dev walk and fly.
There are still things I would change. First of all, I need to work on how the actual facial features are going to appear on my character. I want to make the legs of my bird longer also and exaggerate this feature. I think drawing this up digitally using gimp will give me a lot of room to play around and experiment with colours and the overall look of Dev. This will help a lot when look more at the silhouette as well.
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Creating a puppet
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This is a screenshot of what my animated character looks like after using Photoshop for the first time. I uploaded the drawing of my animated character and drew over the main lines with the pencil tool, and then used the paint bucket tool to fill in the main colours for each part of my animated character. I decided to keep the colours simple so I could make the animation easier if I had to create different perspectives if the character.
I then started creating my puppet so that I can move each individual body part and create different poses etc. I did this by creating a lot of new layers. On each layer I chose what part of my character I wanted to cut out. After choosing that layer I would have to erase every other part of the character leaving on the part of the body I want. For example the eyes and beak would move separately to the head so these all went on different layers. I also had to make a complete part of each body. For example in my drawing the hat was covering the top of the head so I had to complete the head in case the hat moves and it shows the space underneath the hat. I will be doing this for all the limbs.
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Next to prepare my animated character for animation I needed to use the puppet pin tool so I could put in place where I wanted each layer of my drawing to bend to resemble limbs. So after rotating my drawing so it was portrait, I started to mess around with the tool before rigging each separate layer properly. I figured out how to apply points where you would want the limb to bend but also points where you want the certain limb to stay solid. I started to experiment with keyframes and then started working on preparing on each part of my drawing for animation.
Creating Turnarounds
To further the animations I'll be able to do, I started looking at creating turnarounds for my animated character. I first read about how to create these and then had a go at creating my own from different angles.
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I struggled a little with creating the turnarounds as I had to try and imagine the 2D figure I had created in a 3D way. I started by drawing the front of my character and then creating the guide lines so each body part was the same in each perspective. However I am quite happy with what I managed to draw in the end.
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I am quite happy with how these turnarounds came out. It has given me a lot more knowledge and perspective of what I can do when animating my character. When looking at my storyboard, creating the turnarounds makes it a lot easier to envision some of the poses and shots I would want my animated character to do. The next step here would be to draw each of these perspectives in photoshop and take each layer like I did with the front perspective then prepare them with the puppet pin tool.
Digitalising my turnarounds
I spent today digitalising my turnarounds so I can create more versatile shots and positions for my animated character. I learnt a lot whilst doing this. I had figured out more about how to use photoshop whilst doing this. for one I had to figure out a way for getting the right colour using the eye dropper tool, so I had to use an embedded plane to be able to get the right colour. I also experimented with the different brush tools including softness which made the lines a lot less jagged. This was useful as one of the hardest things for me was actually having to draw with a mouse. To shorten the time I was spending on these, for the opposite facing characters, just created another save of the file and flipped the canvas horizontally to create the illusion it is facing the other way. Above is a screengrab of my eight finished turnarounds and below is a few progression screengrabs. Whilst doing this I also decided to redo the front facing character as I realised the beak wasn't in the right place.
