Character Design

            There are a few obvious factors I need to think about when creating my character;

·         Keep them within the Mexican/Luchadore theme.

• ·        Give them a large upper body (since they’ll be doing a lot of throwing!).
• ·       Make them simple enough to animate efficiently.

With this in mind, I began by creating a set of silhouettes to get an idea for the form of the character:

I actually like quite a few of these, so my next step is to take them into Flash and Photoshop to colour them and give them a more definitive personality. Here’s where I’ll also come up with some sort of costume and mask design/colour scheme to go with the character.

I think this first concept is good in the way that it’s quite unique, but I really don’t think it suits the direction I’m looking for my game to go in. Plus, that face is seriously creepy. He looks like he’s just been plucked from the ground or something.

I like the way the muscles could be really squashed and stretched during the animation stage in this design, but there’s something about the rest of the body that I’m not too keen on. I’ll keep the point about the arms in mind as I continue. I like the colour scheme of the mask here and the design is simple enough without being too bland. I think I’ll stick with this colour scheme for now and change it further down the line if I need to.

I was actually really pleased with this particular design, but unfortunately it’s far too complicated to animate efficiently in the time I have to complete this project. I think I need to simplify the design quite drastically.

Again, as much I like this design, I feel as though it’s a little too simple. I think that during animation this would fall victim to looking far too flat and paper-like very easily.

 

After many days of frustration and sketching, I’ve settled on this design for my character. I took the rounded muscles from my second design so I could emphasise them with squashing and stretching and coupled them with a relatively simple-shaped body. I think this design will be easy to animate well and efficiently while still retaining a lot of character. A lot of the expression will come from the face but the body will be easy to manipulate into various different shapes to get the ‘slightly-exaggerated’ look that I’m after. Here’s a turnaround sheet of the character:

At this stage of my development I had a critique session with my tutors, who I explained the idea I had for the colouring technique I would be using:

Here are 4 different styles of colouring; flat Flash colour with either cross shading or block shading and 2 variations of a Photoshop-painted style. I initially chose to go with the Photoshop-painted style (without cross-shading) because I thought the clean outline of the character and the sketchy colour on the inside of those lines would give off a really nice ‘boiling paint’ effect. After doing some research into how long it would take to export each frame from Flash to Photoshop and paint them one at a time, I decided that this method would take far too long and take away valuable time which I could be putting into the animations. For now, I’ll animate the characters in black & white and decide which colouring method is best when that’s done since it’s easier to colour in finished animations that it is to animate with colour. Well, in Adobe Flash it is anyway.

Now that I have my final character designed and the turnaround sheet for reference, I can begin the animation process! I’m doing quite well for time according to my schedule, so hopefully it will be smooth sailing from here on out!