Character Design and Creation - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 59

● Motion: Can the character squash and stretch beyond the boundaries of
what a real skeletal structure would allow? How much? Must it obey the
laws of motion of a physical character?

You can mix things up to achieve the appropriate level of realism and styliza-
tion for your project. If you look at a promotional shot for The Beast (Figure
5.3), you will see that although there is a fair amount of detail in the models,
the proportions have been altered from the human ideal, and the materials are
very simple. While the character of the mother obeys normal laws of motion
and structure, the Beast has the ability to squash and stretch to emphasize his
level of babyhood chubbiness and fl exibility.

If the action of your story requires some pretty wild things, then you will
probably be better suited toward the more stylized end of the scale.

Whichever level of realism versus stylization you choose, you should try to
keep it relatively the same for all of your characters. Even if things end up
rather abstract, you want to give your viewer the illusion of a believable world
with actual characters. It doesn't have to be like our world, but it should at
least be internally consistent, which means that the character style should be
as well.

Figure 5.3 A promotional shot

for The Beast

NOTE
Remember that your character design, with respect to manners of stylization, will need to, in
turn, infl uence your set and prop design. Notice in The Beast how the sets are modeled with a
fair degree of accuracy, yet, like the characters, use basic materials and shading to keep them
from appearing too far to the realistic end of the stylization scale.

The Beast

In The Beast , the theme directly informs the look of the characters.

It was decided early on that the Beast would be tough to look at. Quite liter-
ally “a face only a mother could love.” At the same time, he had to be able to
elicit some sort of sympathy from the viewer for the story's ending to work.
So the theme and story called for him to be ugly but cute, which was not
the easiest thing. With a target in mind, though, I was able to start sketching.
While I used ArtRage for digital convenience in storyboarding, I returned to
my traditional pencil and paper roots for this stage.

The fi rst attempts were all too nasty to elicit sympathy at any point. The fi nal
one, Figure 5.4, was given stamps of approval from friends and family. He's still

Figure 5.4 The fi nal sketch of

the Beast