Designing a 3D character from start to finish.

Firstly, sorry for the lack of posts of late. I have been completely consumed with teaching and a new project recently. 

I have recently been teaching my students at South Seas aspects of character design, and as part of the character design classes each student designed a character. As usual while my students are having fun drawing and designing it really gets my creative spark going, and of course I had to join in and design my own character!

This time I thought why not use the character I design to help me tackle character modelling in Maya. Something I have always wanted to get better at but not had the spare time required to really develop my skills.

Coincidentally I also needed to diversify my reel a little more with some new 3D work. So why not kill two birds with one stone.

I had a really clear idea of the type of character that I wanted to design right from the start. I wanted to design a spaceman character that has very short body proportions but at the same time not look like a child (often a problem when designing characters that are around the 3 head high mark). I also wanted him to have a space suit consisting of a breathing chest pack, air tanks and helmet.

As always I start my design on paper, working out the basic shapes and proportions of what I had in my mind.

First Concept Sketch.

As you can see my sketches start out very ruff and basic using simple shapes to get down on paper, what I have in my head really quickly. 

When designing like this I will go through a series of drawings where I play with shapes, proportion, detail, contrast, and appeal. Trying to polish and simplify the design but still keep the character interesting.

For the spaceman character I had something I was happy with really very quickly. I think I spent about 45 -50 minutes drawing all of the concepts and had my character ready for development stage.

                                                              

Second Concept Sketch.

Last Concept Sketch with Final Character in pose.

With my final character concept in hand, I develop my character for as long as necessary to work out the kinks in my concept. Again, I already had pretty much what I wanted in the character as there was not much development required. However I did make one change to the character and that was to lift his heap up a little so that his mouth could be seen above the level of his space suit. 

I really liked this aspect of his character, but having his mouth out of view would have had ramifications for animation down the line. I would have had to compromise acting and animation to make shots where he is talking read properly.

My plan is to incorporate this back into him during the rigging stage. 

See you can have your cake and eat it too!
 

Developed character before and after head shift.

As you can see I have already started to think about colour. My ideas are kind of a mix of Apollo space program and Star War's Rebel pilot with the black and white skull cap and the orange flight suit. Later in the process once I have completed the modelling and UV's, I will create a swatch sheet with samples of textures, colours and material types that I want to incorporate into his design.

I also intend to use this project to learn and develop a pipeline to incorporate the use of Autodesk Mudbox into my work process. I want to use Mudbox to sculpt extra detail into the character's and export bump, normal and displacement maps for use in Maya. I will still use my existing process of painting the Colour, Translucence, and Specular maps in Photoshop.

With the design of my Spaceman now complete, to move on and start modelling I first need to draw him from as many angles as required to model his features. In the case of most characters you can get away with just drawing the front and the side orthographic views but, in my case because of his chest pack I needed to draw front, side, back and top views. I didn't use the posed character in Maya but I included it just to add a bit of character to my model sheet.

Orthographic views of my spaceman character.

The modelling process so far has taken about 2 days, which I have had to spread out over any spare time I have in between classes and also down time at home. 

This is where he is up to at the moment. I have mostly finished and all that is left is to figure out how his pack is connected to the body. At the moment its just floating there in space but my initial idea was to have a modelled piece of soft padding in between the hard metal shell of the pack and his fleshy soft bits, aren't I kind!

Modelled Spaceman.

I hope that you have enjoyed a breakdown of my process, I will update again later as more of the pipeline is completed.

Ciao.

Geoff Ind, demo reel 2013.

I am starting to get the hang of this blogging lark!

This is my latest Demo reel which shows examples of some of my more recent work, including Character Animation, Lighting, Rendering and Composite. It also has some of my hand drawn animation and digital 2D animation and painting.

UPDATE: I now have a new Demo reel which you can view here.

Examples of my work, Childrens book Illustration.

I recently completed a freelance job to illustrate parts of a series of children's book's which the author wanted to include with his manuscript when he submitted it to the publisher. 

Below is one of the completed illustrations. 

Children's book Illustration.

To give you an idea of my process for this drawing I have outlined the stages that all of the illustrations went through after the initial quote for the job was accepted by the client.

The first step was to go through the manuscripts text and to come up with visuals for each of the passages, these visuals where discussed with the author and adjusted as required for the story.

Next I drew up a rough version of the chosen passage (the client asked for certain passages to be illustrated) in pencil for approval by the client, if there where any changes needed to the drawing they would be made next, again going back to the client for approval before moving on to clean up. 

After final rough approval I would then clean up the drawing getting rid of any unnecessary detail or line work. After clean up the drawing was scanned and painted digitally and finally sent of to the client for colour approval. Again if there are any changes needed these would then be made before final approval of the completed colour illustration.

Examples of my work, 3D Desktop Graphics.

For the last 2 years I have created the graphics for use at South Seas Film and Television school on their computer desktop profiles.

In 2012 the theme was the 20th anniversary of the school's opening.

2012 South Seas Film and Television School Desktop.

This year I wanted to mix it up and to represent the re-branded colours of the school.

2013 South Seas Film and Television School Desktop.

Examples of my work, Illustration and Digital Painting.

Illustration: Digital painting, final piece printed on photo canvas.

This will be my first post to my blog and and I wanted to start with a bang! This piece was a gift and was completed over approximately 40 hours, the original design was drawn out on paper before being scanned and painted digitally.