Character Design and Creation - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 61

Figures 5.7A-5.7B The fi nished mother model

satiny blouse, a black skirt, and heels. Perhaps a little much for walking around the home, but I wanted, in line
with the theme, to make it clear that she puts effort into her appearance.

While the Beast was modeled completely from scratch, I didn't want to take the time to tackle the more realis-
tic requirements of the arms, legs, hands, or feet. Other people have done that time and again, and better than
I, so I decided to tap into someone else's assets. For a full discussion of when and how to get outside help, you
can see Chapter 13. For now, it's enough to know that those particular elements of the mother character were
adaptations of the free MakeHuman project ( http://www.makehuman.org/blog/index.php ).

The Dogs

The dogs are . . . dogs. Because I had made humans from the ground up in Blender before, but never any
quadruped mammals, time constraints dictated that
this was another area in which I would use an out-
side asset. I found a free model of a generic dog
and modifi ed it to fi t my idea of the characters. I
knew they would be furry, so the exact underlying
geometry wasn't crucial. The rendered fur would
mostly cover the underlying polygons, so a clean
deformation structure wasn't a necessity. The look
called for by the theme and the story was one of a
prim and proper poodle-like dog. The fur and curls
were carefully placed and groomed, and a bow was
added. Because the mean dog was going to be like
the Beast in character but not in appearance, the
silly dog needed to have some sort of physical resemblance to the Beast. With all of the fur and nonanalogous
anatomy, there weren't a whole lot of options. One of the defi ning characteristics of the Beast's look was the

Figure 5.8 The dogs together