After finishing my previs I moved onto preparing for the final animation. I started with my characters 3D model. I began by doing some sketches for how I wanted the character to look. I decided to go for an over the top cartoony feel for my character and tried to have him be as expressive as possible. I wanted to have the model as expressive as possible as I felt like it would need to carry the lack of body movement for the character. The expressions would have to showcase his reactions to the audience.
Once I decided on a concept I began creating a block in in blender. I did this by creating and image plane and adding a screen shot of one of my concepts onto it. I them rotated it and turned on wire frame to allow me to model my character to the concept.
After my block in I then went on to model the final model.
Once I finished the base model for my character I then textured it in substance painter. I didn’t want the textures to be hyper realistic as I felt it wouldn’t fit in well with the rest of the sequence. I decided to go for a sort of fleshy, percaline texture for the model as I felt like this got across a sort of cartoony feel to the character without it being to realistic looking. I then began creating and armature for the model. I did this by doing it on one side then mirroring it to the other. I then selected both the armature and the model and paired them with automatic weights. In order to make sure it worked I tested it out by putting the model into a couple of different poses. I also played around with the face to see how expressive I could get the expressions.
