Character Design and Creation - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 76

Character design will both be informed by and strengthen the theme. The realism of characters will depend
upon your resources and the goals of your animation.
While modeling characters, they need to be high enough in resolution to look good when rendered but small
enough in face count to provide a good experience when working with the animation tools. Often a subsur-
face modifi er and normal mapping can provide an excellent solution to this dilemma. The requirements of
animation must also be respected, with quads and edge loops playing a major role in achieving good defor-
mations later.
Outbox
● Character models ready to be rigged and skinned for animation
The Peach Perspective
On character design: When designing the characters for BBB, how closely were your decisions
informed by the technical constraints you knew you would face in production? Did it limit your
designs, or did you simply think, “The coders can catch up?”
Sacha: We wanted to show what we're capable of, so limiting the design just for the sake of “not
getting into problems later on” wasn't an option. It was actually more the other way around.
At one point we decided to give a character a special ability—the fl ying squirrel—which made
things much more complicated for us. For some time we thought about whether to use it or not,
but because it was too cool we decided to just go for it. The only kind of limitation we kept in
mind was the amount of characters to have in the movie. But even with that we took it a bit too
far. “Hey, let's add a bird as a side character…“