Character

psc30016951
Jun 8, 2018
4 min read

I had designed a noir detective styled character I had intended to keep a low Polly to have hard edges on his face and shoulders to add to the character.

I wanted my character’s face completely determined by the shadows and have nothing but solid colours as I originally envisioned it as a pure black and white film/animation. Some of my research was black and white films and how they would use contrasting colours to highlight the environment as yellow and red catches the eye more than white and black. Although when shooting in black and white it allows you to see the characters more clearly but this changed when I wanted colours in the video and I made textures for the character’s clothes

I experimented with a number of colours such as bright yellow and blue, but I preferred the more authentic colours such as the blacks, whites and blues, as they seemed reasonable colours for any decade and I thought they would contrast well. In the end I made the hat a part of the character rather than an accessory to it as it seemed to be the better option and cause less strife in the future, as during his motions, I would constantly have to keep track of the hat.

Using some of the drawings I had made, I made my first character test to see how things would go. I created a cylinder with 8 sides, edited it with edit Polly and then cut it in half. I then cloned the side I kept as a reference and mirrored it to see the rounder version of the character.

I extruded and bevelled my character’s body shape, attaching new objects when needed to, placing the pollys into groups for the different clothing items. I had never made a shirt before with an open collar and I wanted to know how I’d make it, and I wanted to see if I should make the hat part of the head or a separate entity.

Once I made the head and feet I attached them to the body and smoothed all the smoothing groups.

In my mind the character came out okay; the over lapping pollys gave me some trouble but it was a learning experience. However, my idea of how the lights would affect the low polly character wasn’t as I had envisioned and I realised I would have to make him more rounded.

The character was now better suited for the lighting both casting shadows and having collecting light cast on him, but he lost some of the stylised edges (his shoulders are no longer pointy) but he also has better form and less stretching pollys in his walk.

Before I textured him, he looked like this; his skin soft and light to make him stand out in the scene. However, that changed and I redid all of his textures when I made him high polly.

His skin is a bend material, so that I could better control the light cast on the face, with a slight ‘s’ on the curve with 2 standard materials in each material slot with no textures, just colour adjustments.

The rest of him is untextured materials from 3DS Max.

I started with the idea of a low Polly character with every edge being sharp, with only slight adjustments to Smoothing Groups on specific areas

When I changed my model from low polly to high polly, I kept some hard edges where I thought it would look good. Though the face has some details, the character’s face is never revealed close up, so I kept it simple when I could, changing the polygon’s smoothing groups to change the way light affects him rather than bloating out his cheeks or making his cheekbones overly large.

I wish I had kept the hat more stylised but it looked silly on his newer, rounded head and body.

The glasses are a fake glass so arent see through but have a slight reflection and a high shine

Sometimes I think I should have textured on eyes but you’d never be close enough to see them so I thought I would leave them blank.

CATrig is a (Character Animation Toolkit) for character rigging, nonlinear animation, animation layering, motion-capture import, and muscle simulation. It comes with a variety of different default rigs and walk cycles.

After I made the character and was happy with him, I hit ALT_X to make him transparent and started building the CATrig by first creating the pelvis then chest and head make thin the arms, hands and feet appropriate positions appropriate proportions to the body.

To help me keep track of what way he is facing, I changed the colour of the box behind his face and set the arms to different colours with red being right and blue being left.

Once I had the rig the way I wanted it, I started to skin the character, triggering each vertices. I then skinned the character to the rig, by using ALT_X to make the rig transparent and doing the same to the character. I did this to put the colour back into the character.

The Skin modifier allows you to apply weights and anchors to vertices with a value system so you can weight one vertice between a number of cat objects. I selected vertices to alter the weights to the bones, making sure the character’s movements do not cause the pollys to behave in an unwanted fashion for when it’s time to animate. I tend to go over them a number of times in more exaggerated poses that my character might never be in. To test his durability in different shapes and forms and see how far I can bend him.

CAT Motion

The CAT Motion Editor holds the controls of the cat rig and allows the user to adjust and alter the movements.

Track view

Track view allows the user to view 2 graph editors for modifying animated objects in the scene, altering controls affecting the keys and parameters of the animation.

Motion path