For Animated Narratives, my group came together to come up with an idea for an animation that has the setting of the ocean. We decided to make it in the style of classic cartoons, after being inspired by Betty Boop, Popeye and other cartoons from the 1930s/40s. These are the drawings for the concept of my design of a swordfish character. I shared these images with my group in Discord and we discussed what we thought would be useful to include.
The characters were 2 swordfish, a pufferfish and a shark. I was tasked with modelling the swordfish.
I started off modelling the head, which was just a long cone shape. The rest of the body consisted of flattened spheres. I then added fins by flattening cones and then positioning them at the sides and back of the model.
I also suggested that I do concepts for backgrounds, as we were going for a classic cartoon style, it would make sense for the backgrounds to be drawn in 2D. These are some marker concepts.
We looked at the possibility of color backgrounds and I prepared 3 different scenes using watercolor, but decided against it due to it conflicting with the aesthetic we were originally going for. I drew a greyscale background in Krita as a concept. I uploaded this in Discord and we discussed the fact that this was better due to it being done digitally, which made it easier to resize without losing image quality.
I did finished versions of the backgrounds. The team finally decided to go with color backgrounds as we could use a screen filter if we went with black & white. I used Krita to paint these backgrounds and went with a vibrant color scheme. I also added some elements to the backgrounds to give them more character, such as the anchor or the boat.
The next focus was on sculpting the swordfish. It came closer to looking like the concept art the more I developed the model. The previous model didn’t come with a mouth, so I added one for the updated model. I also gave it more distinctive features compared to the other swordfish. I did this by giving the fish a odd shaped mouth, as well as a moustache to characterize it as a foil to the other swordfish.
I will next focus on the sculpting, texturing and color, studying my concept art as a reference point.
Here is the model fully sculpted. I also did retopology on the model in order for it to be easier to texture.
I textured the model in Substance.
Unfortunately, the textures didn’t turn out right, so I had to use a simple color model instead.
I started rigging the model.
In one of the scenes I’m animating, the swordfish is painting a picture of the pufferfish to impress her, so I painted these in Krita. I went with a cubist style for the paintings. I went with second one as it looked less flattering towards the pufferfish.
I set up the scene in Maya.
The scene features the swordfish painting. I couldn’t animate the swordfish leaving paint marks, so I used a camera trick by having the brush move in front of the camera and make the painting appear.
I tried to make my animation fast paced, as it’s influenced by classic cartoons so I made the movements exaggerated.
It came out looking like this.
After that, I rendered the animation separate layers, which allowed me to put in backgrounds.
This is the final animation.