3d Characters for Animation Production with Andrew Klein

MAA 4400: 3d Characters for Animation Production

Students will concept characters from established narratives, then create the models and textures needed for these to become rigged and animated in collaboration with the students in the MA4403 Production Team course. Emphasis is on cohesive design, a sense of developed style, and adherence to technical standards.

JUMP TO A SPECIFIC SECTION:

week 1-2, week 3-5, week 6-8, week 9, week 10, week 11

Weeks 1 and 2: Character Concepting

Welcome to MA4400b: 3d Characters for Animation Production! You are here because you have choosen to focus on Character Development for your portfolio. The focus of this class is to give you the opportunity to advance you own skills while providing artwork for larger team-goals. There are several specific points that this course will focus on:

1-We will be looking at concepting characters to produce a unqiue style with focus on specific design choices which can unify a theme (color, pattern, line, shape, etc...) These characters will be from works of short fiction, poetry, fables, and fairy tales that fall within the Public Domain or original works with documented approval. Yes, you will be visiting the library.

2-We will be using concept art to formulate specific choices for modeling purposes. This concept art may be your own, may be provided by the Pre-Production Team course, or may be the art of one of your classmate's if you choose to work on their project. Once concept art is provided in week 3 by the Pre-Production course, you will get a chance to volunteer to model characters for that project. However, "volunteers" will be choosen should no one want to jump on board. In the end, we are making the Characters for Production Team to rig and animate, so they have to get done. Those not working on the main project will be continuing work on their own designs.

3-Our models will be made for articulation and easy of animation, which means stylized design choices and clean topology will be expected.

4-Our models will be textured and shaded. Textures maps will include: Color, Specular, Displacement, Bump, Subdermal, Back Scatter, and perhaps more.

5-Hair and Fur will be added if needed

6-All characters will be presented in week 11 with a test-rig applied for posing and rendered in a 180-frame 360-degree turntable in .mov format

GOT IT??? Well, lets get started.

Step 1-- find some source material
On Day 1, I will be sending you to the library for about half the class to look up some works of short fiction/poems/fables/fairy tales. All of you however should have already been contacted about this before day 1 of the course, so better yet, you already have something with you!!! Good places to start if you are unfamiliar:

Aesop's Fables

Brother's Grimm

Hans Christen Anderson

Andrew Lang's Fairy Books

Ruth Manning-Sanders Collection of Fairy Tales

Or anything else you can come across, as long as it is public domain

The Production Team project for the Fall 2009 quarter will be detailing this story: "I Bought Our Cat a Jetpack"

Here's the cool part, once we have to story, we can interpret it ANY WAY we like. Here's a favorite of mine taken from Little Red Riding Hood:

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

Step 2-- Start concepting
By the end of class on Day 1, we are going to put pencil to paper (so make sure you have a sketchbook in tow) and start concepting out potential designs for the "main character" of your chosen short story. For my demo, I have choosen Hansel from "Hansel and Gretel". Below are some early pencil tests of the character, along with subsequent design tests for the rest of his family (which we will continue working on into week 2).

When concepting a character, consider the elements needed to tell the story. Modeling and Texturing, in my opinion, is the backstory for any animation. What can you bring to the table that reveals more about who this character is, then just what the animator can animate? In the well known story of Hansel and Gretel (of which there are MANY variations), the two children get lured into a house made of candy, captured by a witch, then escape to be reuinted with their family. That is the absolute basic frame of this story, but oral traddition has provided us with many facets. Consider---->

-in some versions the children are initially skinny, and get fattened up by the witch, while in others, the children are already portly and it's their hunger that is their undoing.
-in some versions of the story, the children wander away from home. In others, they are led off by their parents who are trying to abandon them.
-in some versions, they use trails of stones, woodchips, and eventually breadcrumbs to find their way home. When the birds eat their breadcrumbs, they get lost. Some tellings have no mention of this at all.
-in some versions the children are vile and naughty and worth getting rid of, in others they are innocent and it is the parents who are the evil ones
-in some versions, the witch is blind, and never notices the children getting fatter as she is tricked by Hansel using a chicken bone as a fake-leg when she comes to check how plump he has become.
-in some versions Gretel is the smart one; she lures the witch into the oven and comes up with the chicken bone plan, where as Hansel is the dumb one of the two.
-in some versions, the father is oblivious to the children missing, in others he's the one who led them away, in still others, he leads them away only when the step-mother threatens him to
-in some versions there is a mother, and in others, there is a step mother.

So you see, the choices you make in the concepting stage can have a dramatic impact on the story as a whole.
I eventually choose to make both Hansel and Gretel dopy but likeably characters, rather than brats. For the Parents, I decided to make them generally sympathetic as well.
The Father is a drunk who doesn't know the kids are gone, while the Mother is distraught at them not coming home.

Image by Tyrone Schieszler:

You will notice as well that I decided to create concept art with the characters having a very traditional feel, wearing German/Austrian style clothing in reference to the central Eurpoean heritige of the story. In your concept design, you should determine the feel of the character's world. Hansel and Gretel could very easily be told in the the 10th, 19th, 21st or 25th centuries! That would require radically different clothing choices for the characters. You should scan, download, or otherwise obtain (legally) images of Ethnographic costume reference, and compile it into a montage for Week 2 as well. That should look a little like this:

Here are some great books to help you out (many are in our school's library):
What People Wore
A History of Costume
Historic Costume in Pictures
Costume Through the Ages
European Civil and Military Clothing
Pattern Motifs: A Source Book

Due at the start of class in week 2:
Ethnographic Reference Image, see above.
Main Character Sketchbook designs (b+w), see above for examples. You only need the main character fleshed out, but there should be at least a few pages worth of drawings.
Main Character Concept in 3 outfits (color), see below....

So in addition to black and white concepts for week 2, you will pick your favorite overall design, and create a full-color concept of your Character wearing 3 different costumes. In class will will critique and choose our favorite for you to elaborate on for the second part of the concepting.

Here is an example of multiple costume "concept" from Laika Studio's "Coraline". Specific things to notice here in terms of art-direction: the use of bright warm color in her shirts to offset the blue of her hair, the overall vertical design of the character compared to the horizontal quality of the head, and of course, the crazy attention to detail of zippers, seams, stiches and patterning.

For my Hansel character, I have made these 3 costume choices (click for a larger image). I have kept a limited color palette (you will be limited to 10 total colors for your enitre family, so keep that in mind). I have choosen browns, reds and greens primarily (earth tones) to reference the outdoorsy nature of the story and the clothing reference material from my research. I have played up his skin rosiness, my goal was to make him look like a pudgy little tomato-boy. I have given him props to aid in character development: In several of my sketches I was toying with the idea of him having a fodness for Jello, and I wanted that to carry over into his personality, that he craves weird and obscure sweets. He's got a lobster bib in one to suggest that he loves all food, not just candy. In terms of form, I looked to keep most everything rounded to play up on both the fatness, and the cuteness of the character. In general, I used the word "pathetic" as my primary motivator in drawing this character. These are all examples of things you should be thinking about as you develop your's.

Image by Tyrone Schieszler:

Images by Angelo Cordon and Tyrone Schieszler:

Image by Priscillia Pun:

Image by Robert Hashman:

Due at the start of class in week 3:
Main Character Concept at 3 ages (b+w), see below
Family Concept (color), see below

In week 2 at the start of class we will be critiquing you initial character concepts, your clothing concepts and your reference material.
From there you will be sent out with 2 more tasks to help further develop your character.

First, sure we want to know what the character looks like right now, but what did they look like at the start of the story (was Hansel thinner then?) How about after the story is over? What about as a baby, or as a Grandparent? Determining how you character has progressed, or will progress with age can be central to understanding who that character is, even if we never see them that age in the story. There is no better example of this than the wonderful concept art of Carl Fredrickson from Pixar's "Up" (the book: The Art of Up) goes into wonderful detail, displaying the image below spread out across the inside of the book cover. What I want you to create is comething similar. 3-5 additional age varriations of your character (these can be in black and white as pencil drawings like you see below). This will be due in week 3 for critique.

Image by Robert Hashman:

Image by Tyrone Schieszler:

Additionally, you will be creating concept art for the rest of your Character's family. If the family isn't part of the story, you get to make them up from scratch. Everyone's got a Dad and Mom, but what about a sister? kids? grandparents? uncles and aunts? cousinis? pets? You choose what you feel is essential to create, but there should be at least 3 additional family memebers. This sketch needs to be in full color. The idea here is to make the same design choices you made with the main character, and stylistically apply them to the rest of the family so that they feel, well, like a family! Props and poses should be included to give a sense of personality.

Here are some examples. In each of the images below, you can tell that the same color palette, line weight, shape, and patten choices have been made to create a unified theme:

For Madagascar, 3 tones of brown, black, white and gray are the only colors used. Every character is given an angular feel, with trapazodial heads. Exageration of the thinness of limbs is a common theme too. Personality reall comes across in the poses of the suspious penguins, or the goofy giraffe.

For Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2003 version), There is a very muted color palette as well, reflecting the Star Wars Universe. Shapes are made very triangular, and solid thick lines are used. Agreessiveness dominates Anakin's pose, while Yoda is made out to be the goofy-geezer.

For this family from Planet 51: Pastel colors are used to create a sense of domesticity. Clothing styles are "retro-50's" to reinforce that theme. Notice how muted the green skin and red accents are compared to what they could be, all-in-all to subdue the intensity of the fact that they are aliens. Here the posing too works to convey a sense of domestic tranquility.

Here are even more variations, all using the Wizard of Oz as inspiration. CLICK HERE

For my characters, I used a muted 10-color palette, with very few elements of pure-saturation present. Since I did not use the checkered-shirt design for Hansel, I gave that costume to his father. Hansel and Papa Johannes (yes, give them names if they don't already have them!), are unified in hairstyle and clothing. The Father has a squarer head, where as the mother has a rounder head, which I assumed bore the square-top, round-bottom headed Hansel. The father is depicted as deep into a round of drinks, while Mama Tatja has been crying so much her makeup is running. Gretel has a thing for giant sized pepermints!

Find your style, and stick to it. The Family concept and aging concept is due at the start of class in week 3 for another round of critique before we start modeling. At that point, one of 4 things will happen:

1- you will be placed on modeling characters for Production Team
2- or, you will continue with making the main character from your concept
3- or, you may swtich to model one of the other family memebers from your concept if you like that one more
4- or, if you like a family member from someone else's concept, you can model off of that and work in their style.

PRIORITY WILL BE PLACED ON WORKING WITH THE PRODUCTION TEAM CLASS HOWERVER, SO BE PREPARED!!!!

Image by Robert Hashman:

Image by Tyrone Schieszler:

----continue to the week 3-5 notes on character modeling now-------