So the time has finally come where I have finished the assignment. Honestly I never thought that the time would come where I have a fully rigged/textured model, with rendered animations.
From the first moment that I had gotten this assignment, I knew that I didn't want to model something as depressing as Olivia, I wanted someone fun and bubbly with bright colours. The inspiration that I got Iaven from was Alice in Wonderland, with the art direction and colours fitting my need for something positive. Iaven was inspired by multiple characters, Alice, The Mad Hatter, Bunny in a Waistcoat and the Cheshire cat. Iaven's design has changed quite a lot from the first concept to the last but his core identity as a small child with a bowtie was kept consistent.
With two classmates we got the idea to have a joined story with characters that would live in the same world. This was actually really fun to create the story and characters together with friends and it made the experience so much better!
During his development we had Peer Critique sessions where we would show our classmates our characters to get feedback on and such. I don't know why but I got a very large amount of positive feedback, this isn't necessarily a good thing though because when it was time to apply the feedback to our characters I didn't have much to change even though I thought a lot of things that I couldn't see needed to be changed. The very last peer critique session that I had was to judge our walk animations. Catherine helped me with this and actually gave a lot of helpful advice that I applied to my animation shortly after.
The modeling process was actually not as hard as I anticipated it to be, although some could argue that because my character was so simple and that is the reason for my easy life. I didn't do some parts of modeling such as wrist twists because I had sleeves, and some blendshapes because my character's face doesn't move for the most part, most notably the jaw. Instead I just applied one shape that allows my to manipulate it into different expressions.
For my walk cycle, I originally had the classic walk where the arms are swinging side to side and I made Iaven slough forwards slightly as well. To personalize this I wanted his walk to be very 'proper', as in a very straight back and smaller arm swings with upraised hands. Because of the way he looks this turned out extremely well and I was very happy with what I did. For the context of the walk he looks very smug so I thought that he just caught his sister (Catherine's Character) doing something naughty and he was bringing his sister home to his parents. As the walk evolved and I added in animation layers the story made less sense to the point where I just changed it to him walking through a meadow, and something catches his attention so he looks over his shoulder.
My background concepts consisted of various location such as the forest, town and inside his parent's floral shop. The location of his walk animation I think would be a meadow that connects his house and the secret carrot patch that he is walking towards, he sees something that he is scared of in the middle of his walk cycle, which is a bird flying past and he raises his arms in surprise. Once the bird disappears he resumes his normal walk cycle.
Overall this was a pleasant experience with 3D that I thought I wouldn't like at all, due to a not so nice experience with 3D at an animation camp few years back. The teachers that I got were all very helpful and I'm glad that all my questions didn't drive them all crazy (hopefully!).
Thank You!
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