New character design

After attempting to create a 3D version of my lion drawing, I found that the head shape was incredibly basic. Although I may be interested in modelling and rigging similar characters by myself at a later date, I feel that doing a slightly more complicated character would be more impressive as a dissertation piece.

I have decided to try a caricature human design, with the basic anatomy of an ordinary human but with both extruded and simplified features of the body. I found that looking at Pixar was a good place to start with these, as I feel that they create characters with an excellent blend of realistic and cartoony features (such as big heads, expressive faces and interesting anatomy).

In particular, I focused on one of my favourite Pixar films: The Incredibles. There is a lot of media based around super heroes, so I feel that creating a superhero character is a good way to show off my modelling and rigging skills. Using Mr. Incredible as the main inspiration, I created my new character: Larthur X. To save time, I took a character blueprint from the internet and morphed his features in Photoshop to change his appearance. I then traced over the images in Flash and added a new outfit. I also did this because I don't expect to be marked on my actual character design, so I felt that spending too much time thinking of a new one would be wasted time.

With the front and side views below, I will start 3D modelling tomorrow and see how I get along with it, but I'm hopeful that he should convert to 3D well as the blueprints are fairly accurate.

As you can see from these drawings, the character has a fair mixture of muscle and fat. I felt that having a fat superhero would be more interesting to model and rig, though I currently don't plan to add physics to his individual fat pockets or muscle tissue.

I may change how his side-profile looks as I model it, as right now I feel that his forehead and chin may be too square. Both of these will be answered with experimentation.