New art direction

This weekend we took a trip. And while my wife drove I put on my "art director" hat and did some sketching. I realized that I was not pushing the designs of my characters far enough. My characters always loose a little of their edge when I translate them into 3d models. And my designs this time were mostly pretty tame. So I reworked several of the characters (and invented a new one). I will have to redo some work. But based on my revisions of the first character I'm confident I'll have a better end product.

I think the new design speaks for itself...in a scary, freakish voice.

Smash

He reminds me of the Incredible Hulk in this pose. Just a little update about...not much. I did some tweaking today to improve his proportions and I worked on his facial control rig earlier in the week (evidenced by his glowering eye brows).

Design a fabulous ray-gun: go to NZ!

Weta is hosting an interesting CG design competition. This is one example of their fine work. The winner of the competition gets to go to NZ to meet the designer at Weta.

Color Schemes: Part 2

In a previous post I mentioned that I was going to use a color scheme generator to make a color palette for each character in this project. There are four major characters, and each has its own palette based on the master palette in the center. These palettes turned out quite a bit more lively than I anticipated. This is either going to push me into much brighter color territory than I anticipated, or I will deviate from these palettes as I texture. But whether I stick rigidly to these or not, my thinking has been greatly expanded by using a palette generator.

This is a bit of a digression from my previous rant about rigging suspenders. Last night I spent a few hours fiddling, and I have rigged the suspenders so that they stay "ok" in most situations, and have a few controls to tweak them to perfection after the main animation is done.

The beauty of doing a project like this alone is that there is always something else to do if I get tired of working on one aspect of the project. But it is dangerous because there is always something to "fiddle" with that may not make any real progress!

P.S. Here is a link to a bunch of other color palette tools. I haven't tried any of them out.

EDIT: I did some playing with texture maps based on these colors, and the results are not happy. I think I will need to do a lot more testing to determine if these will work. As palette they look ok. But, in the words of my venerable brother, "Don't let an automatic palette generator make you make bad art." Such wisdom.

The suspenders are killing me

I like suspenders. I don't wear them anymore (thought I did go through a phase in college...) but I still like them. There is something very manly about a hefty pair of braces.

Image via Wikipedia

The epitome of manliness. (Note the suspenders!)

But they are a PAIN to animate. They seem so simple... but actually they are very difficult to work with. The body of this character is very flexible. Each bone of the body affects the shape of the body, and the suspenders somehow have to remain on the surface of the body shape as all those bones move around.

 If I wanted to do it by brute force (meaning meticulously animating the suspenders manually) the rigging would not be a problem. But I'd rather spend some time rigging ahead of time so that I could just tweak the suspenders to keep them looking good and not have to focus on them during animation. If possible.

I am cautiously optimistic that I can make them look good enough for my purposes. But I don't want to spend too much time on suspenders. How much effort is the aesthetic advantage gained by suspenders worth? Would my time be better spent giving him a belt and forgetting the suspenders altogether? Probably. But I won't give in quite yet!