The animation with a .... je ne sais quoi!
As I was doing it for myself, I thought I could share how I go about turning my designs.
If you are having trouble making your designs “turn”, here is a simple trick that might help you. Click on the pictures to zoom in.
And here is a more advanced character turnaround demo by the great guys at Bam Animation
I was lucky to have Albert Lozano as character design teacher while attending Animation Collaborative in 2011 but my drawing abilities didn’t allow me to make the most of that great opportunity.
Albert rarely appears on social medias so it was great to find this little video insight into Albert’s thought process when designing characters, starting from simple shapes based on the personality of the characters.
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I just found one of those rare Joe Moshier interviews. It is in French but Google Translate should do the job.
Joe Moshier is one of the greatest character designer but similarly to Paul Felix, his life is pretty secretive. If it wasn’t for his credits on some of the most visually interesting Disney movies like “Emperor’s new groove” or “Home on the range”, you wouldn’t know about him.
Joe joined Dreamworks few years ago to work on several projects. Here is the French article followed by a quick video interview. Sorry the new version of WordPress breaks the layout of my blog 🙁
http://www.effets-speciaux.info/article?id=175
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The Sweat box
A movie based on a game, yeah I know. Has anyone seen Sony’s “Angry birds” movie though? I eventually did!
I wasn’t too excited about it originally but being directed by Clay Kaytis I knew I HAD to see it even with a 46% at the Tomatometer. I was sure the animation would be top notch, served by great visuals (I love the character designs) and a story that would still have some fun gags and it did.
The movie has become a great inspiration for me lately I have to say, it is a lot of fun and unlike most CG movies those days, they didn’t try to cater for a maximum audience and specifically parents of young children.
Great job guys!
This is my assignment for the CGMA Character Design workshop. We were to design a monster based on a basic circle, triangle or square shape. It is a similar exercise to what we did at the Animation Collaborative. Those three shapes are the basic foundations, the building blocks of strong character design.
Here is what I came up with. The line work and painting job are a bit poor for the moment. Nate will help us with those in the next few weeks so expect a new version soon. The bottom picture are explorations that I first did with pen and paper then cleaned up in Sketchbook pro.
Old Santa
I don’t think I ever mentionned the work of incredible French cartoonist/character designer/story artist Christophe Lourdelet alias Zébé on this blog. Actually I did but that was a reaaaally long time ago.
Zébé has done some great work for Aardman a while back and he is sharing some of his designs with us through a series of posts related to the production of Sony/Aardman’s “Pirates, Band of Misfits” and “Arthur Christmas”.
Albino Pirate
I would also recommend a comic strips he posted right after his first trip to Aardman in Bristol. Sorry it is only in French but you might be able to understand the story through the clear facial expressions and poses.
Zébé is probably a very modest, down to earth guy but in that strip he depicts himself as a pompous and haughty French man, completely unfazed by a gig at Wallace and Gromit’s creators studio, Aardman.
The poses, gags and facial expressions always crack me up. Mistaking a Guiness for a Cappucino …. genius!
Zébé’s blog and his strips actually inspired me to start my own comics and I have been fleshing out some stories for the past few years. I will share some of them with you very soon.
As a teaser, here is a quick digital clean up (still learning) of the main character. The posing is a bit wonkey but that’s the overall design, unless I decide to draw myself a bit taller.
Today we had one more amazing Animation Collaborative Character Design class.
This time, Albert and Chris brought Jason Deamer to give us a talk on Model Packeting. According to Al and Chris, Jason is the best artist for that kind of work at Pixar. Jason shared with us some of his Model sheets from Finding Nemo and we also saw some more from Up and the character Muntz in particular.
Here was the assignment I turned.
This is a rough “model packet” for one of the characters from my take on the “Wizard of Oz”. A “Wizard of Oz” that would take place in Siberia.
A model packet is a document that gets handed to the 3d modelers so they can take a design and turn it into a full 3d model. It can range from 5 to 18 pages depending on the complexity of the character or how much direction the modelers need.
There is nothing too complicated for that one but that was still pretty challenging. It is still very rough for the time being, I will post a cleaned up version very soon. Right now the arms and nose are not detailed enough for the modelers to do their job. The eyes also need to be worked out as they wouldn’t communicate eye direction. I will probably go for cartoony eyes like the last drawing.
I hope you like it!
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Snowman walk
My ex-coworker Ross Burt posted some of the character designs he created for Spare Parts.
The cute robots weren’t selected for the final game but I really loved them. We did model one of them and I got lucky to animate the green one with spray can nozzle head on the far right. Those who know me will rightaway understand why I fell in love with that little fellow 😉
Spare Parts Heroes and Villains
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If you like the Radhowto blog you will love the Art Center. A blog sharing ideas and tips from Artists to Artists. The contributors are no less than some of the best artists in the industry: Florian Satzinger, Rad Sechrist, David Colman, Louie Del Carmen….
http://theartcenter.blogspot.com/
Thanks Annes for the link!
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“Paperwalker” Florian Satzinger
Paperwalker
Thanks to Jean Denis Haas at Spungella, I rediscovered the work of incredible Austrian character designer Florian Satzinger. I got acquainted with his work through an interview on Character design blogspot few years ago.
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