Character/Creature Design
During the early stages of the storyboard, I collaborated with Dina to help me with the concept art of
the bear and the girl. Thankfully, she was available to provide me some good artwork. Once I had
provided her the brief with resource materials from the net as inspiration, she got back to me with a
good piece and I could see my characters better.
(Fig. 5)
It was then that I started to sculpt
the rigs of the bear that Reece had
given to me. But I was worried that
it would take so much of my time as
this was the biggest project I had
ever done and I was not supposed to
do any sculpting and rigging. Yet,
the bear that Reece had provided to me did not look exactly how I wanted it to. One thing I learned
from this process was that I should never parent a mesh to a control of a rig as it would fly off the
screen; I should bind them.
(Fig. 6)
Realising that it was going to take a long time, I stressed a lot about when I was going to start the
animation. When Sanjay has told me to use just one character and I decided to use the bird, I stopped
the process of binding the shoulder plate to the bear. The bear never made it to the final cut and neither
did the other rigs, only the bird and the girl did.
Looking at Dina’s work of the girl, I was sure that I could not model, rig and animate her at the given
time I had left. Looking for a good rig online, I found Josh Sobel’s Kayla rig (Sobel, Josh, Kayla Rigs,
2012-2015) and asked Peppe to provide it to me as I remembered him using it for the second term of
the second year when we did our Character Performance with Mike. From that moment on, I started to
do concept artwork of myself to test my skills and was able to change the colour of the shader on the
faces of her model in Maya.
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