Colour choice

The picture bellow is of a spanish animated show called La Abeja Maya, it's about a young bee who's always getting in trouble with his hive. i chose to show this image in my blog as I believe that colours on the bee would look rather good with Willie. Having black and yellow will give Willie a bug feel and a personality.



The pitcture below is of La abeja maya, you can see a better example of the colours here.



The ant bully is a 3D film which I could not help but think of when I was shown my brief. The ant bully has a similar character background as Willie, except that Willie likes bugs and the Ant bully would rather see them shriveled up due to the heat of his magnifying glass.



In the image bellow I like what the ant bully is wearing, he is clearly trying to blend in with the other ants but still keeping his human features such as hair and exposed skin. I could see this being successful on Willie too. expect maybe a different bug type skin would be applied e.g. a bumble bee.



Another picture of the ant bully but here he is all human and has not been shrunk down to bug size.



The wasp bellow is a clear indication of the power colour can have over a character, when someone sees a wasp or bee, they know to stay away. This is also shown with danger signs. I believe that by having yellow and black together on Willie's clothing I will be able to bring out his dangerous and wild side without exposing his real personality.





this is a picture of Denis The Menace, here you can see a clear example of how a character's colour say tell a lot. When we see Denis all we can think of is trouble.



The wasp bellow has yellow and red as its colors, I dont feel the same threat i would when looking at normal yellow and black bugs. this is an example of where colours can go wrong.



The bugs bellow have the same sort of problems, however, I don't see them as a threat due to their colour but their patten, I feel like stripes are more dangerous, the same way you would feel when seeing something with stripes like a tiger or snake. My opinion is that something with spots is less of a threat e.g. a lady bird and not good for my character's personality.

character modeling and rigging

This picture is of my model when I had finished it in nerbs, at this point the model was not merged together and everything was slightly out of proportion. The arms and legs were too large, which was not what I was looking for in my character. Everything in this scene was made from spheres shaped by the lattice tool, the lattice tool allowed me to give my model shape and also keeping the geometry clean.

Everything on the left was duplicated and then mirrored on to the right cutting my work by half and making everything to the correct size and position allowing me to work easier. When I was happy with my model I added the eyes, this was simply creating a two nerbs spheres and creating a Start Sweep Angle, allowing me to create an eyelid if my character was to blink. Placing another Sphere inside the original and adding a texture called Ramp gave the impression of the eyeball and the pupil.




The picture bellow shows the poligon version of my model, at this stage I has completed my model in nerbs and converted it to polygons (expect the eyes as I needed them to stay as nerbs for future control). Once I had done all of this I had to start the long process of merging my character. I deleted half my geometry when it came to merging my character as I could always simply merge on side, in this case the right side and then mirror it across. This took me a while as I had to clean up my character and find the right vertices I found that when you convert from nurbs to polys a number of things happen to the polygon geometry, I had more than usual amounts of edges, faces and vertices making the cleaning up process very long and hard. Lucky for me my at this point my model was still very basic.





This is my model once I had finished cleaning it up and merging my mirrored side to the original. At this point I hadn’t added teeth of a tongue. I had to re model the hands and feet as the first nurb limbs where too complicated to work with. It turned out easier and less time consuming to just remodel the hands and feet.
My model is smoothed out here but not by adding more detail and vertices, I simply just used the tool Average Vertices to give that effect.

After I was happy with the way my model looks I started on the movement of his face, I duplicated it 15 times and created Blend shapes, one for each individual movement on the face i.e. left eyebrow raise, nose up, smile etc.

Brief C: Character Design

“We would like your students to design and animate some characters for us for a potential animated advertisement for London Zoo. We are thinking about using a visual style that reflects traditional “Claymation” techniques but will be generated using CG processes. The characters should be worked up from the following list:”

1.Willie Billiams – “A hyperactive nine year old on his first visit to London Zoo with an obsessive interest in creepy crawlies.”
2.Cornelius – “A young and cocky ‘silver’ back gorilla, the most civilised and sensible occupant of the zoo by far.”

“I will consider the following points when working through my character designs:”

•“I will work in 3D and I will concentrate on two characters above.”
•I will be using Maya and photoshop to model and texture. The characters should be fully modelled to a maximum resolution of about 100,000 polygons, a decent texturing is vital.

•“We expect to see support work on paper, development drawings and character sheets that should include orthogonal views, i.e. front, back, top, and side, and a more expressive drawing of the character in a typical pose.”
•“I would like to see some expressive animation sequences that demonstrate the functionality of the rig and also character performance.”

Final desging for Willie

This is my final design for Willie, I chose this one as I believe that Willie and Cornilius are characters which share a similarity in the way they look, I hope to be able to show this when both characters are animated together.

Side

The animation scene I would like to make is having my characters bonding by allowing Willie to groom the gorilla. Gorillas are animals which would normally be surrounded by flys, fleas and all sorts of insects, this would obviously get willies attention.


Front

Cornelius

The gorilla will be the character that i will be modeling rigging and animating, here are some of my ideas for Cordilius.





I found myself going for the more 'lanky soft toy ' look so I designed a skinnier gorilla.Front view

This was the design I was most happy with, I know that I had to have such areas like arms and legs quite skinny so when it came to modeling, rigging and animating everything would be less complicated.

side view
I still wanted to keep the characteristics of a real gorilla in my character, that's why I gave it a large head, large forearms and large legs.


Although the design above is definitely more gorilla like I dont think it would be wise to try to attempt the modeling or rigging.

Willie Billiams

these are ideas of a design which i was happy with


I liked this design but i thought that Willie needed something more