Designing an Organic Character

This section shows you how to begin creating a 3D character in Maya by taking you through the basic preproduction design process. Some character-idea generation approaches are presented, and you are shown how to create the designs that you will later use as guides for modeling your character's skin.

Design Considerations

The first thing you want to do when designing your character is to decide the style you want to use. At one extreme, you could design a completely stylized cartoon character; at the other extreme, you could design a fully realistic character. Because this book focuses on creating characters that have a muscle and bone structure, you should avoid designing a completely cartoon character for working through each chapter's exercises. A completely realistic character, on the other hand, can be too challenging for someone who is not already a professional. Photorealistic characters must not only look real, they must also animate realistically, which requires a lot of subtleties in the character controls. Between these two extremes is a surreal character design, such as a Shrek-style character. This kind of character has a stylized look, while still containing a believable anatomical structure. Such a character is easier to model and animate because viewer expectations will not be as high as for a photorealistic character.

One of the things that make most popular characters memorable is that they are unique in their design. Although there is no formula for creating a memorable or popular character, you can use some techniques to increase the appeal of your character designs. One thing you can do is exaggerate various parts of the character's body. Exaggerating features on the face, for instance, can make your character more expressive. You can see some exaggeration in most cartoon characters. This can be developed into a style, such as that done by Nick Park of Aardman Studios. The characters designed for Chicken Run, as well as for the popular Wallace and Gromit animations, all have exaggerated mouths and teeth, increasing the expressiveness of their speech.

Another technique is to create a unique prop or clothing article that is always associated with the character. Actors often do this to get into their roles and to focus the attention of their audience. Keep in mind that you should avoid choosing more than one prop, because multiple props will split your audience's focus. One thing that most popular characters have in common is they are all pretty simple in their design. In the award-winning animation short Gerry's Game by Pixar, for example, the main character wears a simple dark suit, white shirt, and glasses. The main complexity in the character design is in the face and hands, which focuses viewer attention on the character's performance rather than on the attire. The main prop that drives the character's performance is the glasses, which Gerry constantly removes to change character.

To increase the realism of your character, make sure you gather plenty of photographic reference. Even if you are creating a surreal character, you can still base the design on a real human. If you study photos of a real human face, for instance, you will notice that they are not as symmetrical as often expected. Very few people actually have perfectly symmetrical faces. Instead, our noses are crooked, our eyes are different sizes, and our heads are not round. Using photographic reference can help you to incorporate these asymmetries into your character designs, which will make them look much more natural. You should also study anatomy books, and try to incorporate key anatomical features in your designs.

Creating Preproduction Designs

After roughing out some character ideas, the first main preproduction designs you should create are model blueprints. These are clean, clear drawings of your character's whole body from the front, side, and back views (see Figure 1.1). Pose your character in the traditional default pose with arms stretched out to the sides, and feet shoulder-width apart. You can choose to do a more relaxed pose, with the arms and legs and fingers bent, but this can make it more difficult to model and place skeleton controls. Moving the arms and legs of your character away from the body will be important when you later bind your character, because it will produce better weighting on the skin. Also, it places the arms and legs halfway through their range of motion, which will cause less stress on the geometry when they are deformed with skeletons into extreme poses. Other drawings you can include in the model blueprints are close-up views of your character's face from the front, side, and three-quarters views.

1.1. Create preproduction drawings that you can use as guides when modeling your character. The model blueprint should show your character in its default pose from the front, side, and back views (character designs by Carla Merrell).

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Continue doing preproduction drawings by creating action poses for your character. These can be sketchier than the model blueprints, and should be of your character's entire body from several dynamic angles (see Figure 1.2). Choose poses that you may use in your animation, and that produce a good silhouette. Place your character's limbs in a variety of positions that will show the character's range of motion. These drawings should give you an idea of how the character will be deformed in your animation, which can be useful knowledge when creating both the skin models and the animation rig.

1.2. Draw dynamic action poses that show your character from many different angles (character designs by Carla Merrell).

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Some other preproduction designs you should do are of your character's face in a variety of facial poses. You can create these using the face model blueprints as a guide. Try to make them all the same size, and orient them all straight ahead. Draw a variety of facial expressions that show your character's range of emotion (see Figure 1.3). You can later use these poses as guides for creating your character's blend shapes. As an additional option, you can create drawings of the mouth poses required to do lip-syncing, such as the shapes for saying O, E, I, A, U, and so on.

1.3. Drawing expressive face poses will make it easier for you to create blend shapes for your character (character designs by Carla Merrell).

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Finally, because you are going to be creating a somewhat realistic character, you should make some preproduction drawings of the anatomy structures that will be inside your character's skin (see Figure 1.4). Again, you can use your model blueprints as a guide, and overlay where the bones and muscles should be placed. This will be useful for when you model the skin, so you can make sure it will be anatomically accurate, and it will make it easier for you to create accurate Maya skeletons during the setup process.

1.4. Overlay internal anatomy structures on your character designs to help you place bones and muscles during setup (character designs by Carla Merrell).

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Maya Character Creation. Modeling and Animation Controls
Maya Character Creation: Modeling and Animation Controls
ISBN: 0735713448
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 75
Authors: Chris Maraffi

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