Final Proposal and Current Progress

For my final, I intend to take the character I designed and create a small series of animations with him, which my Thesis team will then (time permitting) implement in our game. It should be noted that some of these will be true animations while others will actually be a single frame that will be 'animated' in the game I'm putting them in. For example, running will be a true animation, with the legs actually moving across multiple frames (and possibly other small effects, like hair and headband movement), while something like swinging or sliding down a wall will likely just be one frame of the character in a certain pose while that frame moves as needed in the game. I may create some examples of what this looks like for my final presentation in this class.

At this moment, I am working on finalizing my character's design. I have consulted my team's lead artist, who redrew my design in his own style to show how it would look if he drew it, and I am in turn taking his redraw and drawing it again myself, with some of my own tweaks and changes, so that the final design should look like a smooth blend of my character design in his art style. Although this final design is not yet complete, I'm putting what I have so far in this blog post. I will be continuing work on the design over Spring break, and will update the blog when it has been completed.

So far, I am quite pleased with how much closer this drawing is looking to my artist's style. I have observed how he draws with his tablet, and did some reading on how artists draw with tablets, and so now I am using multiple layers to create my drawings, which can be seen in the unfinished drawing above. I start with a layer that is essentially a stick-figure skeleton, to make sure my proportions are correct, then create a new layer where I do a rough, sketchy outline of the character. Once it looks like what I had in mind, I do another layer on top of that, where I use a mix of the pen tool and my own hand to redraw the lines smoother and cleaner. After that I create details on a new layer, drawn roughly again to make sure they look the way I want them before going over them in yet another layer.

This method of drawing has allowed me to break my habit of trying to draw all the details in perfectly right from the start, because now it doesn't matter how dark I draw -- I can erase without leaving any smudges behind, and I can adjust opacity on individual layers to lighten my drafting layers before going over them again on new layers. The only problem I have now is trying to keep my lines as smooth as possible, because photoshop doesn't have an automatic line smoothing tool, to my knowledge, but the pen tool is helping with some of that.

Although I will be using my artist's drawings of our protagonist as reference material, and will be consulting him from time to time to make sure I am adhering to the game's aesthetic style, it is important to note that all the drawings I submit will have been drawn by me, and that he is only functioning as a sort of editor or supervisor for my work, not drawing it for me.

Rough Character Poses

After coming up with the initial character design, I created a few rough sketches of him in poses he would be in while performing certain actions in the game. I also created a series of skeleton-stick figures with similar proportions performing various other actions from the game.

Initial Character Design

For this assignment, I went about designing the character that I would be animating for my final. It is my hope to use these animations for my Thesis/Games project, a 2D game set in future Japan and featuring modern ninjas as the main characters. This character is named Fukurou, which is Japanese for Owl, and he serves as the protagonist's mentor. In our tutorial level, he will be issuing directions to the player and demonstrating some essential techniques.

I had two goals in mind while designing this character -- first, I needed to imitate the style that my team's lead artist was drawing the rest of the game in. He chose to draw in a cartoon-style, with our characters having disproportionately large heads and eyes, and small bodies with little muscle or figure definition. As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm used to drawing in a style that tries to be more photo-realistic, so this cartoony-style of exaggerated proportions and minimal details was very foreign and difficult to me.

My second goal was to incorporate elements of the character's namesake in his design -- I wanted him to look somewhat avian, so that people would look at him and think of a bird, if not an owl specifically. To his effect, I made his eyes and pupils even larger than they would normally be, and a curved, pointed nose not unlike an owl's beak. I also gave him a hairstyle similar to a horned owl's ear tufts, a short, tattered cloak reminiscent of wings, and pointed gauntlet and boot armor accents that look a bit like talons.

I was relatively happy with the sketch, considering it was my first attempt at drawing in this style -- although more so with the actual character design than the drawing itself. Still, I could tell it needed work.

Life Drawing Workshop

Here are all the sketches I drew during the class where we were had a live model come in. I've taken a life drawing class before, so these exercises were familiar to me, but I am a slow drawer and thus was only able to get the basic outline down on most of my sketches before running out of time, and sometimes I wasn't even able to finish that much.

One of my problems is that I try to get a lot of the details right the first time around, which slows me down considerably. Apparently most artists start with a rougher form, drawn very lightly, then build the details on top of that. I've never been good at drawing lightly, which means if I start with a rough form and then try to erase it later it doesn't come up as well, so my drawing gets dirty and smudgy. Thus, I developed the habit of simply drawing all the details in the first time around, to minimize how much erasing I have to do. I like to think I have had some success with this strategy, but it has a few drawbacks -- it's slower, it's more difficult to correct my figure's proportions as I go, and I become so focused on copying the figure in front of me that it becomes difficult for me to draw with my own artistic style, rather than simply striving for photo-realism like I usually do.

Metal Fly Animation

This is the animation I created in the beginning of the semester for the assignment where we needed to create a short animation using one of the pre-rigged models given to us. I came across this robot-fly construct among the choices and thought it was interesting, and I've always been kind of interested in how insects move all their legs in conjunction, so I decided to try to make a walk cycle for this model. I had a couple of sources, which unfortunately I can no longer locate, but one was a video of a six-legged robot designed to walk like a bug, and the other was essentially a stick figure recreation of an insect's walk cycle, shown from top and side views.

The tricky part about this assignment was actually the fact that the rig wasn't made properly, and so the pipe-like appendages coming out of the sockets in the bug's body, which the legs slide in and out of, did not actually move with the legs. Therefore, I had to go through the animation, syncing up each pipe to their respective legs and making key frames for all of them, making this project much more time consuming than it otherwise would have been. That is why I did not have time to finish the walk cycle so that this GIF would loop properly and look like one continuous walk. I also had some difficulty exporting the animation, which is why the model is kind of low quality and there's some weird lighting issues with it.

If I were to continue working on this, I'd make sure the legs all looped smoothly, and look into how the bug's body should rock and sway in time with its legs. I'd probably also make it slide across the camera's view as it moved, to reinforce the illusion that it's actually walking.