Week's reflection - 8/2/2013

These past two weeks, I have learned how to properly model my character, modelled his body and his head, and attached these two components together.

I learnt that you are not supposed to create the pieces of the character's body separately, they are supposed to be extruded out from a single cube. This is giving me a question of how I am supposed to add on the character's clothes, but I presume there is a method for this.

 The head, I did model separately. I started with a group of points, and eventually built the whole head out of them. Then, to attach them to the main model, I transfered the shape over, then welded them together.

This is the full character.

Now all that's left with Thomas is to rig him so that he can move.

AJ Fosik

AJ Fosik is a sculptor, who uses some creative processes to supplement his sculptures.

His work tends to look exotic, as if it were imagery from India or somewhere similar. The sculptures are usually fanciful animals, like wolves and bears. He works in wood, and apparently doesn't put much planning into what he will create beforehand. I like that his work is so colourful, and it looks very striking.

Marc Craste

Marc Craste is part of a British animation studio named Studio AKA. He mostly works in advertisement, and he created the Lloyds TSB adverts.

His works have really exaggerated noses, and can be rather surreal and fanciful. For instance, the character in the train in this advert spends his whole life on the train. In this way, the exaggerated faces add to the fanciful imagery, creating instantly recognisable characters.

Peter De Seve

In college, we watched talks people who work with character, as designers, animators, or artists. The first was a man called Peter De Seve.

Peter De Seve mostly does illustration work, for newspapers, magazines and such.

I've noticed an interesting habit in his work, which is to insert fanciful, unreal aspects to ordinary situations, especially in his work for The New Yorker. His caricature-like art style gives an interesting spin to it, that you don't notice the fanciful aspect right away. On first glance, the art looks like a simple caricature of an average moment of life, but when you look again, you realise something is not as simple as it appears.

Character Modelling - Face and editing torso

Today, I continued modelling the face, which I have been doing for a while. A different piece of software was suggested to me, called Sculptris, which I found much easier, faster and more intuitive.

But, I discovered that it gave the head model far too many polygons, making it unusable for animation. So I had to go back to building it with polygons on Cinema4D. I had built the mouth, eyes and nose already, so I started to grow the chin and back of the head out.

I also edited the model of Thomas' body, so that it did not look quite so feminine, and also so that it will be easier to attach to the head.