Final Cinematic

Below is the final video of our group cinematic. There were a few issues that crept up during the whole process, most of which were resolved, however the main thing that got to me the most was the animation when it was exported out into Unity3d. The problem was that some of the geometry ended up moving about on their own without having and key frames on them in Maya. Apparently this is happens because Unity tries to convert the curves from Maya and it's not as stable as it should be. To overcome this problem a possibility would be to put it through Motionbuilder before Unity, this should in theory stabilise the animation more. I guess there are just compromises to be made, especially when doing something like this is, has hardly been done before. It's good to see how programmes can be used together and how the industry is using this to their advantage. When Unity 4.0 comes out it should be improved to a much greater standard so hopefully this issue will be fixed.

I'm quite happy with how the animation turned out in the end considering it was my first real attempt to make a substantial animation using biped rigs. There are many things I would change but that comes with time and practice - walk / run cycles for example.

Gloria Kendrick - Private Eye from Siobhan Parkhouse on Vimeo.

Key Frame Animation

I just came across this film that was produced in 1971 by the National Research Council of Canada which shows how key frame animation and 3D models were produced. It's quite amazing to see how far the technology now has progressed and how much we take it for granted. To make a simple cube it involves drawing out the individual lines whereas today it's pre-made, no work involved. The whole process it takes just to key frame some animation is a lot of effort, there are a lot of stages that need to be done before you can move on to the next pose or frame. Watching this has just made me appreciate Maya even more and how much you can actually do with it. We shouldn't be afraid to push the boundaries as if people back in the 70's didn't do this 3D modelling and animation may not be as progressed as it is today. The people back then were pioneers and what we have done in this module within Unity is something that has not been done as much so you could even say we are pioneering to an extent.

Animating

I did all the animation within Maya and in a previous post I mentioned that it took me a long time and a lot of different iterations before I was happy with a run cycle I had created. Throughout the whole animation process I have constantly been going back through my reference videos we took at the start to work out how our characters were going to move. I also would act it out to myself to understand the weight and movement of the character more.

To begin with I blocked out the animation which gave me a good idea of how long the shots would be and I could work with that when refining the animation. I was then going to change the curves from stepped to linear and then to spline, however I found this really awkward, when changing between them my movements ended up being all over the place and I couldn't edit them too well. I'm not sure if I keyframed everything each time so this could have been the reason why so I may try this technique again at another stage when I have more time. Because of this however I ended up starting from scratch and using the auto tangents. I didn't really edit the curves too much once I keyframed it all, maybe a few tweaks here and there for timing but I didn't really have the time to go in and really analyse each part. I would have liked to as this would have given me more practice within the graph editor. I did keep referring back to the blocking animation though to make sure I was on track with the timings.

The video below shows a playblast of where Gloria falls into the buildings which consequently knocks them all down, because I couldn't get any reference for this I had to guess and luckily it turned out really well on the first attempt. I made sure they fell one after another, but at a quick enough pace to look convincing. I think they all fall over a couple of frames which may seem really quick but it needs to be that fast, needs to be punchy. I love animation and even though I struggled with the run cycle it just takes time and practice to get it looking right, by doing this module it just confirms that I do want to be an animator and more specifically a character animator.

Sound Design

At the beginning of this module, once we had created the animatic I found some royalty free music that seemed to fit out genre quite well so Phil added these in as a test to the animatic along with voice overs done by me and recorded by Lija. Animatic found HERE.

It gave us a good overview of how our scenes would play out and also gave me a tone to work to whilst I was animating. When it came to putting it altogether we realised that we needed extra sounds such as footsteps and some character noises as we found it was lacking and by doing this it gave the characters more life and it ended up just sounding more of a complete project as a whole. Lija and Phil recorded my footsteps so we could play this when Gloria runs. To get it synced up we played the shot of her running and I ran at the same time, trying to sync my footsteps with hers. It worked quite well and we did the same thing for Harold's footsteps and other character noises. By watching and recording at the same time it saved Phil a lot of time as he knew they would match up when it came to putting it altogether.

We recorded the sounds using the sound booths at uni and used the programme Audacity. When it came to recording folie sounds, we switched the microphones over to something that was more suited to capturing specific / close up sounds. Phil then took all of these recordings and edited them together with the recording of our cinematic in Final Cut.

It was a really enjoyable process and it is something I think I will get more into - recording my own sounds for my future projects. It just makes it that much more personal and when you work on a character for so long you know how they walk, how they should sound so in a way it is better and more beneficial for you yourself to do it.

Run Iterations

I spent a long time working on the run cycle, probably over a week and it got to the point where each time I edited it, it would just get worse so in the end I think I deleted it about 4 or 5 times to start afresh. I took reference videos of myself running in similar style shoes to our character, I even looked at references off the internet and other students work to get a better understanding of how they were working. I even got feedback from another animator yet it still wasn't right. I just wasn't happy with the way it was going. In the end I finally got out 'The Animator's Survival Kit' and as soon as I did this it all just clicked into place. I took screenshots of the main poses of one reference video and used that to create my key poses of the animation, however I think because our character was so stylised and her proportions aren't of a normal human being, the run would have had to be adapted in some way. That's what is good about 'The Animator's Survial Kit' it shows you many different iterations of runs and walks, some stylised, some more humanised; it even highlights certain aspects of the cycle that I would have never even thought about, such as offsetting the timing so everything isn't moving at the same time as each other. By doing this one little thing and offsetting by just a couple of frames it changed the look drastically.

Walk and run cycles are always going to be the hardest things to animate as everyone knows how someone walks, so the smallest of things will stand out to the normal eye. The only way I'm going to get better at it is just through more practice, and looking at more reference and really sitting down and studying it before I go ahead and animate. Throughout the whole time I was animating I kept getting feedback from others but the problem was that I just got told the same things I already knew and it was hard to see how I would go about to change those factors. Either way though feedback is always useful in whatever you're doing as it can point out things that you may have never of noticed beforehand.




This last video is where I pretty much gave up and scrapped the whole lot to start again. Sometimes it is needed though, just reworking the same thing over and over again was only making it worse, starting again allowed me to have like a clean canvas where I could just concentrate on the movements from scratch and not have other things distracting me. I think next time I will definitely draw out thumbnails of the main poses so I know what I'm working to and look into doing dope sheets. Dope sheets help with organisation and timing of the animation and are really useful, I look back on it now and I realise how much use it would have been to me if I had actually done this.

Cut Scenes - Interactive vs Non-interactive

I decided to look into cut scenes and how different they are between games, some are interactive whereas some are non-interactive. Most of the games I have played (bearing in mind I am not a huge gamer and have only played a small handful of games) the cutscenes have been non-interactive where you would just sit through it and watch it play. There are many pros and cons to this as you could say does it actually take away the immersion from a game? You would be playing a part of it and sometimes I have felt the cutscene has been really abrupt and takes you off guard. Other times however it is a nice break inbetween almost like a point in time where you have reached a goal.

An interesting article I came across was on Gamasutra found HERE where game writers are discussing whether the non-interactive cutscenes should not exist anymore. It gives an interesting view and brings up the point whether gamers these days actually have the patience to sit through cutscenes. There are some cutscenes that are just too long for their own good, it may have been the fact that it was just too long or maybe the story didn't grab me enough but I have found myself loosing attention and the patience to sit through them. Cutscenes should be an extension of the story within the game and hold your interest to carry it through to the next level. Another interesting point that is brought up is the fact that "...the jump to a cutscene removes much of the empathy that you might have in a movie...". The cutscenes themselves may be produced to a high standard and hold a great deal of emotion however because of the jump from interactivity to non-interactivity you loose the immersion; it breaks the player away from being engrossed within the game.

There are very simple interactive cutscenes such as 'Deus Ex: Human Revolution' where the gamer is still able to move the characters head around so you can take in the surrounding area. This is still just as effective as it keeps the gamers interest with other things but doesn't take away the full immersion of the scene. Cutscenes don't have to be complicated interactive cutscenes to be successful.

At the end of the day it's the gamers personal preference, peoples opinions differ and it depends on the game itself. It may benefit the game to have non-interactive cutscenes as it gives a break form the game, almost like a breather. This is similar to Studio Ghibli films where in every film they always include a section where it's very tranquil and you can just take in the environment and scenery. It gives a break and allows you to take appreciation for the art style. In accordance to our own cinematic, ours is non-interactive, however it could easily be made into an interactive one by adding a first person controller into the scene and making the gamer move around with our character.

"Let the entire character -- the model, the voice, the animation -- tell their story" - Chet Faliszek

Character Animation

Below is a quick test of a piece of animation I have done on our second character. Lija rigged him and weight painted and she did a good job with it, especially with the face (shown HERE). We had spoken before that the main aspect of this character was his moustache so it should be able to move in a variety of ways. I enjoyed animating this scene as I could play around with how his moustache could convey his thoughts and emotions. It would have been great to be able to push this further, however due to the fact that Unity can only take bone driven animation, blend shapes weren't an option. It's a shame really because some really interesting facial animation could have been created but I guess that is something to explore in the future.

Even though this character is hardly on show, probably only for about 10 seconds or so I still want him to be a believable character and this is all down to performance. For this I ended up pulling a variety of faces in the mirror to see how his face would deform when he would be on screen, obviously I then had to simplify these down as the facial rig was only very basic for it was going into a game engine. I'm quite happy with how it has turned out so far, I just have to be careful when it comes to animating him further because as he is so blocky and low poly, he can't move as much as Gloria. There are certain parts of him that will just deform when it gets to a certain point, Lija has gone in and locked off and limited certain attributes but I have actually gone back in and taken some of the limitations off. I did this because I felt that I could get a better idea of how far I could push it with the animation before it became deformed. Limiting is always a good habit to get into when create characters as in industry, this is what I would get being an animator - a working character that has been set and locked off. Obviously within industry they have far more complex rigs that work to a higher standard so going back into the attributes and changing things would not be necessary.

Blocking Animation

In industry, animation is normally blocked out first to put down the key poses and to get a sense of timing. If anything in the script was to change, this would be the ideal time to do it. II thought I would try out this method as before I was just keying the animation using the auto curve and adjusting it from there. Everyone has their own way of working but I thought I may as well try this technique out. Blocking gets across the idea and motion of the character easily, I have showed the rest of my group the below video to get feedback and before I change the curve from stepped to linear I will adjust a few things, such as slowing down the run cycle. I also need to add in some facial expressions, blinks and just general small things that will add to our characters personality.

When I go to change the curves to linear, I will be adding in extra key frames to smooth out the animation and maybe deleting any unnecessary ones. After it has been completed with linear curves, I will then take them to spline curves, this will be the last stage and hopefully the refinement of the animation where I will be adjusting things here and there.

The below video is the blocking animation, not all of it is there as our second character is just being finished off at the moment. To utilise our time the most efficiently, I have begun animating with a non textured model and environment. These are not needed for animation and it means everything is progressing and nothing is on hold. They eye texture is present however as I wasn't able to gauge the eye movement very well without having anything on the eye geometry.


A useful blog I came across awhile ago was, 'Animation Tips and Tricks' where professional animators give their insider tips. It's really helpful and gives you a good insight to the industry practice. One that I found was on blocking animation and why they do it within the industry, Animation Tips and Tricks. It gives the supervisors and directors a clear idea of what you are going to be doing and what is going on in the scene. One thing I haven't done, but will do in future is before I go in to blocking the animation I should really draw out thumbnails of each shot to give my ideas more grounding and stability. Looking at this blog and back at my blocking I realised in some places I could have not included as many key poses as it was clear what the intention was. This was my first go at it so there are still lots of things I can improve on, but at the end of the day it's a learning process.

Reference Videos

In order to achieve a believable animation, we shot some LAV's (Live Action Videos) for reference. I find it really useful to be able to refer to videos when animating as I can be sure that I'm putting down the key poses in the correct way, also by recording these I am able to scrub back and forth through the video and really analyse how the body moves and what parts move when. As I am going to be animating the character I thought it would be best for me to act out the parts as I could get a better feel for it and understand her movements more. Animators are pretty much actors anyway, you need to be able to understand the movements of a specific character and the best way to do that is to act it out yourself.

Lija recorded a wide range of videos, the main actions / movements such as creeping, running, turning around etc, but we also did close up of the feet so I am able to really study these and make sure that the way our character walks is correct to how it is in real life. I quite enjoyed acting out the different parts but still need to get in the habit of doing this all the time with any animation I do. If I had more time as well I would have liked to break down the video into key shots where I could just refer to these when blocking out the animation, rather than scrubbing the video the whole time. Scrubbing the video is useful to see how the the poses move from one to another, but with the blocking stage of animation this isn't too necessary at the minute. I have uploaded a couple of videos with the links below.

Creeping Walk

Sitting Up

Uncharted

As we are making a game cinematic for this module I have decided to look into the making of a cinematic of a well known and popular game, 'Uncharted'. This game amongst many major titles uses motion capture when creating the cut scenes and in game animation. Motion capture is where the actions/movements of a person are recorded and then by using that information it is translated to create animations. By using motion capture,  it would speed up the process and produce more realistic results, complex movements are more accurate.

For the first Uncharted game because of the space they were using it was not suitable to record audio at the same time so this had to be synced over the animation at a later date. Even though this produces good results it's better if it is all recorded together at the same time, easier and more efficient. Obviously this depends on the space, you need a room that doesn't give you back any echo or where other sounds are present.

The video below shows part of an Uncharted cutscene that has been broken down to show the process. You can see the videos at the top are what is being captured by the cameras and the actors in the mo-cap suits that allow for this to happen. The bottom left is how the whole scene would look without textures, just the basic outlines of the environment and the characters movements. The bottom right is the fully rendered sequence. Further in to the video you can see that even though there are certain objects that are not shown in the basic modelling, it still needs to be recorded in the first stages. This gives something for the actors to get a grasp on and the actions will be more believable. The props are modeled and added in at a later stage.

There will always be pros and cons for both motion capture and key framed animation, as we are doing key framed animation it will undoubtedly take longer however we can put more emphasis on exaggeration and the 12 principles of animation. Even though motion capture is quicker, for exaggeration such as squash and stretch, this still needs to be done afterwards as movements that do no abide by the laws of physics cannot be captured. Depending on the style of game would determine on what technique is used, whether it be motion capture (more realistic) of key framed (more stylized).

UV Mapping

I had previously unwrapped Gloria - our main character, which took me a really long time, probably longer than it should of, but I got there in the end. I knew in some places it was a bit messy and the way I unwrapped parts probably wasn't the most efficient way to do it. I had to re do some of the maps however as when it came to smoothing our character she turned out to be a fair few too many polys. Ideally a character should be as low as possible around 6000 - 7000 polys, trying to be the most economical. Because she was so many polys I went and started deleting unnecessary edge loops and by doing this I got her below 8000, the issue was that by deleting edge loops I had messed up the uv map. I think by deleting edges after it was mapped I may have deleted the seams which would distort the map itself. I was annoyed at the fact I would have to re do most of he unwrapping again, but in hindsight it was a good thing. This time I was able to make the map a lot neater and more understandable.

Now knowing this, with our second character we have smoothed him and then Lija deleted the unnecessary edge loops first before unwrapping him. This shouldn't distort the map in any way as we are doing it after the editing stage. We just hope that smoothing it beforehand won't be detrimental in any way as we were told to unwrap first then smooth. I guess we shall soon se if there are any issues, but hopefully they would be an easy fix if anything.

Modelling our second character

Carrying on from the previous blog post, I have now completed our second character. He has turned out really well and I particularly like his facial features, he is such a stark contrast to our main character and I think the contrast will work great when they are put together. Due to time constraints I am not going to be able to UV map and rigging the second character as I know the animation is going to take me awhile, so I have passed these jobs onto Lija. Learning from our previous character we are going to smooth him first, delete unnecessary edges and then UV map him. This character has been quite simple to model compared to Gloria, however the hands were a bit of an issue, as he is quite 'chunky' and stubby I had to work out a good proportion for his hands, hopefully they'll be alright when it comes to rigging and weight painting.
 

Alien Animation

As I mentioned in a previous post, the next stage to my alien would be to animate it doing a walk, jump and an idle which would then be taken into Unity 3d for a turntable. I have created a playblast of the animations in each state of the alien; skeleton, skeleton and controls, geometry and textured. This gives a better overview of the alien and the construction that took place to create the final version.

I still find walk cycles a bit awkward to do and it is something I really want to get better at so when it comes to animating the characters for our cinematic; I will be wanting to create some reference videos to work from and analyse. I find it easier to do other actions and a bit of facial animation so hopefully this will stand out in our cinematic, but as most of it is walking I need to make sure that there are no issues with it and that I am able to execute it to a high standard.


Alien Animation from Siobhan Parkhouse on Vimeo.

Second Character

I've started modelling our second character, the boss man that is judging our main girl throughout the training course. Using the turnaround from Lija (found HERE) I did the same process as before to turn them into image planes to model from. I did a really rough model of this character a few weeks ago so the head didn't take me that long to do compared to our woman character. The bit that is taking the longest at the minute is his clothing, I still need the adjust it quite a bit as the clothing should really reflect his personality; stern, disciplined so the clothes should be sharp and in form.

At the minute it's just in smooth view but I've tested it a few times with it actually smoothed and have found that the braces in particular don't work too well so for them, I think I will just use soften edge. This is quite useful as like it says, it almost softens the edge, giving it a smoother appearance yet without adding any extra faces to it; so this is almost ideal for games that have a poly-count.

Finished Alien

My alien is now fully modelled, textured, rigged and weight painted. The process was quite straight forward, placing the specific joints to create the skeleton then adding controllers with constraints, making sure that they were to the right ones. As it was a simple rig it didn't take me too long to weight paint, probably the most time consuming thing was setting the SDK's (set driven keys) and limiting and locking off all attributes. This is a good habit to get in to as within industry, animators would just get a fully working character without having to change the rig in anyway. The SDK's were applied to the feet and hands to allow more complex movements such as the reverse foot lock. By creating the reverse foot lock this allows more of a natural movement when it comes to walk cycles, otherwise without these it would stand out too much.

All there is to do now is create 3 states of animation: a walk, jump and an idle stance. This will then be baked out and exported for Unity where I will then create a character turntable. The turntable will allow the viewer to move around the character whilst the animations are playing. 

I produced 3 really quick animations in order to do the turntable process and see what needed to be done. A script was added to randomise the animations and then put on a loop. There was an issue that came up, as the animations would move from one to another the eye of my alien would deform and almost pop out. Apparently this is due to the actual script as it moves to the next animation it has to almost cross fade it into the next so that's why this deformation happened. There's nothing I can really do about this but I hope it won't be too bad when it comes to my final one. 

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Unity Web Player | turntable

« created with Unity »

Rigging and Weight Painting

The rigging process for Gloria was quite simple as nothing really differed from the alien exercise I had previously completed. The only major change was adding more joints to her hands as she had been modelled to have 4 fingers and a thumb. I had to adapt the rig slightly as our character was more stylised and her coat affected the way her shoulders would move compared to a human. For this I had to move the shoulder joints down further than they normally would and the clavicle joint I ended up hiding as it wasn't until the weight painting began did I realise it would affect the model quite drastically if I left them on. The clavicles ended up deforming the geometry too much and I found it easier to weight paint just the shoulders. If I could have used the clavicles it would allow more breadth of movement. The reason why I hid the controllers so you wouldn't be able to move them was because I did a lot of weight painting at that point and didn't really have the time to go back and unbind the skin to delete them.

Initially I was going to create dynamic chains for the coat so they would move with the legs in a fluid and natural movement. To do this I created joint chains that went down the sides and front of the coat, created curves that followed the joints and used the nHair system in Maya to make the curves dynamic. I then had to group and parent them in a certain order and create a sphere to go round each leg. This sphere would act as a collider (when made to collide) and stop the legs from going through the coat. I got the process correct however when it came to moving it I had a lot of issues. For one the coat geometry would never return to its original place and also found that it deformed far too much even after weight painting - as seen below.

To overcome this I had to compromise by just having the coat bound to the skeleton like the rest of the body. The coat would still move with the legs, however it wouldn't be as much of a fluid motion and because of the low poly model and the weight painting, if the leg moves past a certain point it would penetrate the geometry. The image below shows how the leg moves with the coat when bound. It took me awhile to weight paint it correctly, mainly because I duplicated the coat to overcome the backface culling issue within Unity. However by doing this I placed it too close to the outside of the coat which made weight painting a nightmare. In the end I deleted in inside part and it was a lot easier to do, so when it comes to putting it into Unity I will just change the coat shader from diffuse to the soft occlusion leaves shader which projects the texture through the geometry and you can't not see through it.

Modelling our first character

So modelling has begun on our character and I have started with Gloria first (our main character). Lija has been doing research into proportions and other attributes to help refine Gloria, which can be found HERE. Along with this she gave me the t-pose which I turned into image planes to model from within Maya. There were different iterations of Gloria, mainly with and without the coat, this was really helpful as I was able to just concentrate on blocking out her main body first and then change the image planes to add in the coat afterwards - found HERE. Throughout the concept art stage and creating the t-poses Lija would constantly get feedback from me to make sure it was looking okay and if any adjusments needed to be changed. This worked out really well as I could advise her on what I would be able to model and if anything may have been too complicated for myself to make.

Throughout the whole process I have tried to keep the mesh simple and the topology clean, whilst keeping the poly-count low. I probably spent the most time on her face as I didn't want her looking too realistic but I'm hoping the textures will emphasise this even more. To keep things simple her head and legs are not attached to another part of the body, they are simply placed within the clothing. When it comes to rigging and binding it will all hold together, I will just have to weight paint it in a particular way in order for her waist not to show through the coat when she moves.

The bottom of the coat was a bit of problem solving for myself as when it is rigged it will have dynamic curve which will create a more fluid motion that we can easily animate. Because it will be moving I had to create it so it would be able to move about so down the middle at the front, the coat is not joined. Also with it going into Unity afterwards I have to remember about backface culling - if the normals are not reversed one side will not show up. I duplicated the outside of the coat and reversed to normals to get around this issue, so hopefully all will be fine in Unity.

I spent awhile on her shoes too, it probably wasn't necessary as the viewer might not even see them that well but it just adds to the extra detail. I extruded certain parts and merged the vertices to create 'laces' of some sort. They aren't perfect and there might even be an easier / better way to create them but it's what I was able to come up with.

The next stage is to model her hat, this is another separate geometry, however will not be attached through the rig as we need it to fall off at certain points. I don't think it will need rigging in anyway as it may just complicate things. After this I will get on to unwrapping her so I can pass the UV map onto Lija to texture. Whilst she is doing this I might go onto rigging her or move on to modelling our second character.

Private Eye Monologues

In our group we decided on having our girl character do a monologue that runs alongside the our cinematic, by doing this it would reference old detective movies more and add more to the atmosphere of the scene. I have been looking into old movies and also any recent movies or programmes that include a private eye monologue; I have found that it has been used a lot in TV programmes/animations. The three that I've looked at so far have been:

• Pinky and the Brain - "Brain Noir"
• American Dad - "Star Trek"
• Rugrats - "Radio Daze"

All three are animations and even though they are based around the private eye detective they all differ from one another. I was mainly looking for key phrases that were spoken which I could then use to come up with a script for our character. Some of the phrases that we may use are "The night began like any other..."; "My next step was clear"; "I was a man on a mission and no-one would get in my way".

Not only by watching these did they give me ideas of what to include for the script, but in both Pinky and the Brain and American Dad, the character starts off face down in a pool while a monologue talks over before it cuts back to the beginning. This is another aspect that seems quite common within detective style movies/programmes, almost a parody even. By seeing this appear in both shows it gave us the idea to open up our cinematic of the camera fixated on our girl's face as she is lying down. It would set our cinematic up and you would instantly know it's in the detective style.

We're going to play around with this idea a bit more and hopefully finish the script before long so we can create an animatic with rough sound and a monologue on top. By doing this we can have a better idea of what will work and how long each shot will roughly take.

UV Mapping Alien

This year UV mapping is slightly different as we are now unwrapping a full biped character. It's pretty much the same process as what we learnt last year and using the same tools, the only major difference is learning how to unwrap the head and using a tool called 'select shell border'. For the head you just have to take into account of the mouth pocket created, this should be unwrapped separately which would leave the head to be unwrapped normally. 'Select shell border' tool allows you to expand the edges of a projection you have taken; e.g I took a planar map from the top of the foot, after separating the top from the bottom using 'select shell border' on each this allows you to see and easily paint for the edges of the foot.

I have just done a really simple texture on my alien just to show that the UV mapping I have done is correct, I think there still needs some fine tuning e.g lining up the texture perfectly around the seam but I will definitely make sure this is done when it comes to our final characters.

Moustache Man

After writing up a couple of character sheets the next stage is to produce some drawings that are based off these. I want to improve my drawing skills a bit more so I wanted to contribute to the concept part of the brief. I had a rough idea of how the boss man should look so I started sketching out a few ideas, concentrating more on face shapes as his moustache is the main focal point. I tired out a range of different shapes to see what would best compliment his overgrown facial hair. Passing it on to the rest of my group for feedback I have managed to come up with a possible final idea for his face (it still may need tweaking), but I think I will take it into Maya and block it out to get an idea of volume and how it will be in a 3D space.

We have also decided on his body shape being almost like an upside down triangle, he is very well built on top but has short legs which can give him an almost comical look as you would expect him to be quite tall in comparison. Below the drawings you can see a quick model of this character in I did in Maya. At the moment it is just in smooth preview, it may not be this smooth when it comes to making the final one as it would bump up the polygon count quite a bit. His hair and facial hair may need to be modeled separately but I will have to find this out, at the moment I have just extruded out specific faces to create them. I will pass these on to Lija so she can get a better idea of proportion and how he will look from different perspectives.