Character Design – Conceptulized Game

So one of the assignments that was given out at the start of the trimester was a character design project, which we had to concept throughout the first few weeks before we actually started it in week 5. And during those few weeks I kind of had trouble with the concepting of my character..

The project, which was for a proposed game where we had to create a “Spin-Off” of an already chosen television show, some of the choices were the Steven universe, The Flintstones, The Simpsons, Pokemon.. Our class was split into two groups and each group was to choose a style that was to be used for the characters “team”

Our group of 6 or 7 in the end chose the Simpsons, but that style was very limiting and the project had it’s own limitations like, creating a character that can only have 500-1000 triangles in the model, it didn’t seem hard to me but The Simpsons was all round like and caused many problems with spheres and triangles, one small low poly sphere used up all 500 triangles that were needed. The characters that could also be used was also very limiting as many of the other groups chose styles that they could create whatever they liked as long as it was in the style, We then changed our style to futurama, it still fit into The Simpsons style as it was made by the same person, but we could create anything.

So, everyone in the group decided to choose character who have already been in the show, but change them a little to mirror the original characters.. I didn’t want to because this project was essentially something that we had to create ourselves, but make it fit the style of futurama..

In the end I wanted to create something original, nothing that has been seen but something that still worked in the show or something that has been mentioned but never shown. To make something original I had to do more research where I finally decided to create a Werewolf. It is something that has never been seen in futurama but, so far a Were car has been shown.

To get myself started we had to create a design for the character and then model it and then unwrap, texture and rig it.

Easy peasy right?! Well no, I can’t draw great.. if I do draw something.. it looks like a children drawing, I suck at it.. but I gave it a try in the end and the concept kind of worked.. I kind of copied characters that were similar in design that have already shown up in the show, animorphic? characters all seemed to have similar designs compared to a werewolf.

I tried to start off with drawing the head, but it was just concepts and these were almost total copies of the original characters.. I didn’t want that so I got some feedback from the drawing lecturer who gave some helpful tips and even drew a few images to help me get started on the body. One helpful tip that she gave me was to figure out a backstory to help me draw the character that i wanted. So I decided that the werewolf would be the bumbling idiot of the group, who doesn’t pay attention to anything, who also happened to be a space pirate, werewolf. I went on to create a very dodgy model sheet to work off of for my 3D part of the workflow.

Note, this isn’t the finished model, just a WIP copy

This was kinda helpful to get the overall shape, but the 3D part didn’t turn out anything like this model, well the side view did because i used that the most. The model worked out well, when molding it into the right shape, and then when moving over to the rigging, well that also turned out great, but that’ll come later..So after working on the model over the weekend, Saturday was mostly used for modeling and Sunday went into unwrapping and texturing the model. The unwrapping stage went OK, because of last trimester since i did it on a more advanced model, so this time was easy peasy simple. I remembered how to do it and that made the texturing stage work just as well.

This is the finished unwrap that I created, for the finished model, I arranged it in a way that was easy to understand for someone who is working on this kind of stuff, but still looks odd to one who doesn’t. The unwrapping stage is essentially making a 3D model 2D flat as it’s own image, the coat/shirt was on the bottom left, pants on the bottom right, head and facial parts top left, and arms, legs and feet/hands on top right. I also arranged the unwrap to have minimal, if at all bleeding, while still trying to keep the unwrap at the right size..

As said earlier, the model had to be under 100 Tris but also to have a 256×256 texture map. The unwrap would also have to be 256×256 size.

I did actually encounter a few problems with unwrapping the hands & feet because of their peel edges as they would line up properly, it turned out to be an easy but probably messy fix, which still gave the desired result.

This is the finished texture result, which shows the coat, pants and face better. Since the model had to be under 1000 Tris and 256×256 pixels, the texture really only needed straight colours. as shown with the minimal use of other colours to define the characters clothes, feet and face.

As said above with the Unwrap and the problem I had with it, the feet and hands had a weird defect I guess you could call it. So I fixed and made it look good in the 3D part. Well as best it looks in 3D anyways.

I didn’t have the time to figure out using other types of texture maps, but that will come in due time, as i have decided to figure it out throughout the Animation obstacle course!