OUAN05 - Final Characters / Sketches - The Classical Elements

This is the final time I plan to revise the characters for the animation, because time is becoming less and less until the deadline. The reason it has taken me all this time, is because for the animation I wanted to produce the balance between recognisable and well crafted character design and making them simple enough to be animated in a short period of time is quite hard to achieve, but I think I've managed to do it now, so I'm pretty much ready to go once the story board has been finalised. The colours I needed also had to be simple and suit the elements each character would represent, for example the grey/washed out brown coloured character represents wind whereas the green/blue character represents water. I hope I can represent the fluidity of these elements during the animation itself. 

Final Characters a & b

During the design process of the characters, I went through several stages of development to come to a final design that I liked and would work given what I wanted to achieve. In hindsight however, this process was very impractical and I will learn to develop characters and know how to achieve what I want faster in the future, but I didn't want to settle for something I wasn't happy with despite the extra work it could create.

The first process involved the research of samurai armor, and armor in general. From here I sketched out and coloured different designs that I could then use as a basis for my ideas when moving forward and creating appropriate character models. I created a simplified version for each of the characters I had drawn out in detail that could potentially have been used in the animation, but some had features that would have made it difficult to pull off due to time restraints, such as flowing hair or clothing that I don't feel I could have pulled off given the time and my current level of animating. So from here, I refined the characters for a final time which are shown above. The characters have typical and recognisable features that I wanted to include, the cloth armor, the simple colours, easy to animate proportions and overall a simplistic design that I hopefully won't have trouble animating when it comes to that stage in the project. Overall, I'm quite happy with the way my characters turned out and hopefully they portray at a reasonable level what I want them to during the sequences.