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 3 thru 5: Character Modeling

Due at the start of class in week 6:
Characters Modeled and UV'd

We now move into the modeling phase of this course. Since you each have previous experience in character modeling, these weeks will act primarily as lab time, with weekly reviews of your progress. You have 3 weeks to model and UV your character, which I assure you is far more than you need. Some of you will get this task done in 1 day!

Models should follow established topology guidelines and should be built to minimze the overall polygon count. I would suggest caping your polygong count at 16,000 quads at the most, which is a huge number. We want these models to be efficient, even if it is at the expense of minute detail.

For my Demo, I started with a zsphere base:

And from there, I used the the retopology tools of Zbrush to make my initial poly model:

After tweaking the form with the Move and Clay brushes, I got a much closer-to-concept version, which I again retopologized:

Then, I was able to export this geometry to Maya and finish my Modeling:

Finally, I created this UV layout with a region for the head, skin and shoe, and a second region for pants, shirt, and buttons. A tileable texure will be used for the shoe laces (scaled UVS on the left):