Having researched Genndy Tartakovsky’s art style, and rewatched several movies from the Hotel Transylvania franchise, it was time to start designing my character.
With expressiveness, energy and personality key elements of the design, my initial thoughts were to create a bat-like character; possibly along the lines of an eccentric, distant relative, and after searching for inspiration online, created the character mood board, and the few quick sketches below.
However, on further consideration I shelved this concept, thinking it both cliched and quite frankly too similar to the Hotel Transylvania 2 storyline when Drac’s 2000 year-old, human-hating father comes to visit, and also having already modelled Zubat, a similar bat-like character during assignment one, I decided that going in a totally different direction would provide a much better learning experience.
My next thoughts were to create a character based around the zombie bellhops, so with this in mind I created the following mood board and sketches.
Looking at these, I felt particularly drawn to the tall, scrawny, gaunt character in the background which had also been released as a free character rig by Sony, and began thinking of ways to incorporate these features into my own character. However, with so many possibilities available – my character could literally be anything as long as it’s in keeping with the Hotel Transylvania theme – I was undecided, until a chance comment regarding ‘a bull in a china shop,’ took me along those lines.
Remembering the elderly gremlin in Hotel Transylvania, whose catchphrase is, ‘I didn’t do that,’ as opposed to the normal expectations for this animal, I decided to have my character appear old and frail, but as a backstory, reminiscent of Batman, Danger Mouse, or Penry, the mild-mannered janitor in the 1970’s Hanna-Barbera cartoon ‘Hong Kong Phooey,’ to have a secret identity and super-human strength to perhaps unexpectedly save the day. And so, with this in mind I completed the sketches below.
While this seemed to be a novel idea (when I Googled the relevant terms, I couldn’t find any appropriate images to include in a character mood board), when I thought about it further, I realised that the wrinkles and indentations required to make the character believable might prove too difficult for me to sculpt in Blender at this stage in my course, and posting such a thin, stick-like character on Sketchfab wouldn’t really be making the best use of the available space. Also, with Sketchfab an excellent website on which to present my portfolio, uploading a poor design that could potentially be seen by millions, even at this early stage when I’m still learning and finding my way in Blender, was not an option.