Working on the second character I quickly realised that the design would be too similar to the previous one and felt it wondered too far from my original set of designs that were intended to be drawn with lines. Going back to the drawing board I decided to redesign the second character to better fit my original vision. While I won't be using this design for my second character there were a few things which I like which include:
- The brush textures you can get from using a program like Photoshop.
- The line art which defines the face.
- The gradients used to define the body and nose.
- The colours used to contrast the arm and nose from the body.
For the second character I decided to stay true to having a short/tall/happy/sad theme with the second character staying true to its original design. Having learnt a bunch of techniques from creating the previous set of characters I felt confident that I would be able to animate a plain character with black lines which I felt unsure of before. For the design I had decided to go with an S shaped body so the character looked hunched over but still looking where he is going. With this design, the character looks tired and slow a perfect match for the slow walk I had intended for it.
Having decided on the look of the character I tried giving it the same pass as I did on my previous attempts. While the character does look interesting, It loses something with the absence of the bold lines that creased its neck and torso.
After drawing the character with its arms behind its back I was instantly reminded of the same type of pose an elderly would take as they stood or walked down streets. Their walk was slow and with their short steps kept their hips and head from moving around like you would find in a normal walk cycle. Before creating the rig I thought about how each part would be designed and bend.
I am fairly happy with the final result. The only things which have stood out to me looking back on this animation are:
- The hair and ear should be put into the same layer. Looking closely at this animation you can see the ear slightly clipping out due to the hair.
- The eye moves around. This is due to the puppet pins in the body morphing it in such a way that the parented eye cannot follow.
- A possible solve would be to bake the eye into the body but in that case I wouldn't be able to animate a blink.
- If the character can be animated without having to animate the face area then the eye should like fine.
- The arm might not look as how I had intended. I'll need to look into reference images and see if it can be fixed. Also unfortunate how the arm covers the torso crease since I felt it added to the character design.
While the legs were originally designed to be straight I felt that drawing them bent gave a sense of weight and fatigue to the character. Due to time constraints I've decided to refocus my outcome into animating only a walk, run and jumping animation for both characters. With the designs locked in thumb-nailing for the rest of the animations can begin.
