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Pratt Institute
Department of Digital Arts
Instructor: Prof. Claudia Herbst-Tait
Course: 3D Character Animation, DDA 517
Designing a Character and It's Look
For this class, you are required to come up with a simple but effective design of a character who wants to come to life.
You should feel good about this character because we will use it for all of this semester's exercises and assignments.
Rather than designing several characters (and several rigs), we want to focus on animation...
Depending on your style, modeling
and rigging skills, your character's design may be quite simple, or even basic, but
include a very flashy, fancyful or fantastical rendering style.... in other words, the form of your geometry is only part
of a good design. Think about the overall, rendered look!
In the beginning, try to be inventive without getting too complicated; be playful and loose in your drawings.
Get a sense of who it is you would like to animate. Try and stay clear of everyone else’s idea of what a 3D character
ought to look like: define and invent your own. Do research and be creative. Don’t be afraid of bad ideas!
Write ideas down and sketch a lot.
Drawings by Jonathan Tsung-Han Lee
Drawings by Jonathan Tsung-Han Lee
For now, don't get too settled on any particular idea... keep drawing and get some ideas out.
(Pst, if you don't have any ideas, you are probably trying too hard.)
Drawings by Jonathan Tsung-Han Lee
Drawings by Jonathan Tsung-Han Lee
Students may consider 2D elements and layering techniques in their 3D designs...
Here's a successful example by Laura Zajac:
Laura Zajac
Laura Zajac
Laura Zajac
Laura Zajac
Some more simple but striking character designs/looks... (artist's names and sources to follow very shortly!)
Sketching for motion...
Once you've designed your basic character, you should do darwings in which your character assumes the poses that you will animate.
Each drawing should be expressive, clearly convey the action, and, since we are focusing on weight, the drawing should communicate
the strain your character experiences.
Take a look at Preston Blair, Cartoon Animation and note how he constructs his characters for animation. More specifically, he builds
the character around the actions/motions the character will act out and always visualizes them as three-dimensional shapes moving
through space.
Preston Blair writes, "When constructing an animated character, visualize it as a three-dimensional puppet that you are joining together with
solid masses." (p. 40)
In Maya, we are doing exactly what Blair suggests: we are building a three-dimensional puppet! In finalizing your character's design, build its
elements around the character's line of action. This is a smart appraoch in terms of designing, as well as in terms of rigging, a character.
Drawing by Rachel Bowers
Rigging...
There is a big difference between successfully rigging a character and successfully rigging a character that animates well. In this class,
we will use Maya 2012's HumanIK. If you want to create your own rig, make sure to
generate a rigthat facilitate a wide range of motion and
that won't get in the way of the actual animation process.
For your character, consider a simple but smart rigging scenario, such as the one depicted below, by former graduate student Meng-Han (Richard) Ho.
For his character's rig, Meng-Han parents joints to the geometry and binds (smooth/rigid) the parts of the character that will actually bend, or deform,
such as knees and elbows. While the character looks quite complex, and while it features a series of nicely thought-out controls, there's a simple and
flexible approach at the heart of its functionality. It's a smart design and setup that could work for a number of different types of two-legged creatures.
Character designed and rigged by Meng-Han (Richard) Ho.
Character designed and rigged by Meng-Han (Richard) Ho.
Character designed and rigged by Meng-Han (Richard) Ho.
Here is another example of a simple character and rig. Although this design, too, is quite simple, it becomes interesting through expressive poses.
You guessed it, each pose was carefully sketched out before the character was animated... This design, model, rig, and animation have been created
by Andrew Boccio. Notice how nicely exaggerated every pose is, which makes the story read very clearly:
Character designed, rigged, and animated by Andrew Boccio.