Design Exercise - CGI and Stop Motion

Our lecturers has assigned for us a small task to help us understand how character design is done. For this task, we were asked to do character sheets for a character in a CGI animation and a character appropriate for stop motion. We were told our characters for our Term 2 projects would be okay, but I felt that mi models were not appropriate for this task, so I did some research and decided to design two new characters specifically for this task. 

My first character was going to be for CGI, which is the area I wanted to go into so I thought I would try and do this to the best of my ability. To help me think of how the character should be designed, I looked up some popular CGI animations and I saw the character design for "Fanboy" (Green overalls, Purple gloes and cape) from the Nickelodeon CGI animation, 'Fanboy and Chum Chum'. This is a low poly animation, which is easier to put out for television production. These character would more likely be animated on the software, 3D Studio Max, which is suitable for television production, as opposed to Maya, which is appropriate for film production. 

I started drawing and front and side of the character, using a ruler to help guide me. Then, I scanned the page into Photoshop and added a back, working from the front. I believe working digitally helped me as there is a lot more freedom to producing images as you can fix simple mistakes, where as if you did it traditionally, it is difficult to erase mistakes. 

The character I designed, I decided, would be appropriate for younger audiences, as the body is made of simplistic shapes and would be suited for low poly animation production. This is the sort of human character that would be seen on other CGI shows as 'Fanboy and Chum Chum', the CGI animated 'Fireman Sam' and the children from 'Transformers Prime'.

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For my stop motion design, I thought of 'Fireman Sam' before the show was animated in CGI. This was in the 1980s when puppets were still being used. I looked up the images of both stop motion adaptations and tried to design a simple character, thinking of their design.  came up with an average looking human, which is appropriate for stop motion production.

Just like I did with the CGI model, I drew it on paper in my sketchbook and scanned it into Photoshop, cleaning it up to look neater.

The annotations are digitally done as handwriting is hard to read. The annotations serve as notes which help give the overall idea of how the model is going to be made. In this case, there is an example of it's budget, tie down and K&S. I can clearly see how the skeleton of the model would move from the inside of the puppet and this would help me to make the model.