Main characters: faces

I finally made two heads for the main characters.
When UI was looking for sample animations I found some interesting character designs. Here are examples:

As you can see the characters look cartoonish but they are also a bit similar to human. I decided to go with this style because I never replicate someone’s style (I made my characters with some changes). This will allow me to put some emotions into the characters. Besides, I don’t have to make this look realistic – it is recommended that the animation should be cartoonish.

To create the head, at first I used sphere. I turned off the ‘smooth’ option ( after all I want to use ‘turbo smooth’ or ‘mesh smooth’) and I stepped the segments to 55. After that I converted my model into ‘editable poly’.

To make the modelling easier I deleted the half of the sphere and then I applied the symmetry.
Then I was modelling my character face. I started from the nose, then I made holes for the eyes.

The next step was creating the mouth and adding the eyes. The mouth is important in this model because my character will talk. So I made sure I had enough of polygons around the mouth so the mouth animation would be smooth.

Then I made the hair and I applied the textures. To make the hair I simply selected the top polygons of the model and extruded them.

The same way I created the female character

design

I finally decided what I want to do for the ‘character animation’ assignment.
I decided to use a particular scene from the movie ‘dumb and dumber’.


Right now I have done the body for the main characters (I’m still working on heads) and I finished the outside scene. I know that our task is not to pay special attention to make the scenes look perfect but, anyway, I want my movie to be well done.



So here is the outside scene. It is still not finished and I didn’t put any lights there. I used the textures that are available in 3ds max tutorials folder. To make the houses look like this I used the box with increased segments and then applied ‘Taper’ and ‘Bend’ modifier. The last thing to do was to put texture into the box.





This is the character that will be shown in the background. It was made from box. The model is very basic and easy to do. Te main characters will look similar to this one..

Ideas

Now it is a good time to think about ideas for the final character animation.
First of all I was looking for a style for the movie. It is important to know what kind of animation I hope to do. I want to do a funny conversation between two characters so I will be able to put some emotions and body language into the animation. I decided I would not try to animate human characters because the animation would look artificially rather than real. Even some big companies like Pixar or Dream Works avoid realistic human characters. I decided I would create some cartoons characters, which allows me to insert some emotions into their acting.
Before I started my work I had made a simple research.
I made a research just to have a better knowledge and idea about how long the movie can be, but the most important in all was to study body language in short animation movie clips. Because what I will try to do is to find a funny conversation movie clip between two real actors, I will have some kind of reference for the facial expression and I will try to make it more ‘cartoonish’.
Here are some examples of short CG movies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsUzz5H7gHo&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU6aLDZ4Ero&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvpG_zUDcR0&feature=related
I made a decision that my characters would look quite similar because I really like the style. Right now I know how my movie should look :)