OUAN504 - Character Development

Once the concept for the story had been established the next stage of the process I undertook was the design and development of potential characters. For the purpose of the story we intended to use three pigs, each with their own characteristics or personality that could be portrayed through the use of props, body shape, body proportions, features and expressions. For example, the idea of pigs plotting an escape from a farm would require a pig to do the thinking, or an intelligent character, a pig with the strength and determination to dig them out, and the third pig would be there as an extra and to act as the middle ground in terms of personality and to find a balance in the personalities featured in the story. I made sure to show my work and designs to Wing as often as I could in order to make sure she approved of the ideas I had and we could move forward, which fortunately she did! I used a mix of traditional and digital media in order to find an appropriate style and medium to portray the characters. With traditional media, I used a mixture of pencil, pen and charcoal to create block silhouettes and try to determine the shapes and proportions I thought would work best at portraying the characters in a stylistic and appropriate way considering the context and genre of the story. I found this to be quite helpful and once this stage was complete and I was ready to move forward, I created my more refined designs and illustrations digitally using Adobe Photoshop along with a Wacom tablet. Using the Wacom tablet I strived to create angular and undefined edges on the characters using various brushes such as the chalk brush, to create a textured effect. I think the mixture of digital and traditional media when designing is quite important as each serves it's own unique purpose and has their advantages. In this case, the accessibility and ease of access of traditional was great to get my ideas onto paper using pen and pencil, whereas the digital side was more for refining what I had done up to this point and adding colour, experimenting etc. During the design process reference material was a huge influence in developing the characters. There was a difficult mix of creating the characters for this particular animation because they had to have a simplified design that could comply with mine and Wing's ability on Maya, in other words be simple enough for us to be able to model them to a high level and to an accurate degree. Secondly, the characters had to fit the style we were hoping to achieve, so block shaped with sharp bodies with oversized proportions to demonstrate a level of 'cuteness' and the friendly nature we wanted the characters to possess, showing the audience they meant no harm and ultimately were likeable to a degree where the audience engaged with them. Finally, making them actually look like pigs, even before colouring we wanted to make sure they had the telling characteristics of actual pigs, so plump bodies, short limbs, beady eyes and a round snout - these in some cases are exaggerated for the purpose of the design aesthetic, but all in all we wanted to achieve a certain level of familiarity and likeability with our characters that came across immediately, especially since the animation is only one minute long - so hopefully they leave a lasting impression.

I tried to do some simple drawings based on the anthropomorphic style pig I had in mind, I included a few varied poses to get an idea from the different angles and to obtain a fairly good idea about the bod shape and posture that would most suit.



After the initial sketches I wanted to pad out the design, so I took my idea into Photoshop and developed it further using all the ideas and requirements that I listed above. I tried to play around with a couple of poses and try to develop a personality and back story for the pigs - like Sara mentioned in her lecture on character design. I also played around with colours although I changed the arrangement of colours several times until I was happy with it and enjoyed experimenting with different layers and layer settings in order to achieve various lighting arrangements on the pigs body, giving the character a slightly new feel and a 3D feel. The addition of props such as at the spade, in conjunction with the poses I created the pig in bring the character to life more and are more interesting design ideas to look at. I also tried to add a Fullmetal Jack reference with one of the pigs helmets. Overall the simple design of the pig is what I was trying to create and I'm happy with the angular lines and texture that I was able to achieve in Photoshop, and plan to take the stylised look into the development of the 3D character in Maya.