Characters and stuff.....

Well hello there people of the internet, today's post is going to be about characters and stuff. So as I may have already said my final aim for this project is to model a character, rig said character and animate it, I am slowly starting to find out what I like to do and at the moment it seems like modelling is my love so I may change my project to just making a high quality character and leave out the animation side of it, one of the reasons for this is not just because I like modelling its because i lack good character art to model from since I am not the best drawer in the world, I have asked my friend who is an amazing artist to draw me up some character art to model and he did it however i lost the link he sent me so I cant get the art again >.< since his internet is currently down "saying that I did see him today and totally forgot"


Hopefully I will follow through with my first plan since I have already done planning into it and that lucky if I cant get the art of him there are lots of free character art on the lovely internet which I could use as long as i quote the sources so the examiners don't fail me as soon as they look at it -_-

A lovely bit of character art done by David Revoy for Blender cookies 2011 character modelling tutorials.

Good thing about that lovely bit of art above is its totally free to use, ahh there are kind people on the internet.

After researching enough and reading books I have finally found the correct order of events in a art section of a games studio that involve a 3D artist basically this is the chain.

Concept Artists:

The first line of arty people these guys/gals create the concepts for the characters, weapons, world and draw them up in pen and pencil then scan that drawing into a computer and finish it up on a bit of editing software for example "Photoshop" or "GIMP". "For any examiners out there that think I have put the word GIMP down as a joke I am not joking its actually the name of a piece of editing software see link at the end of the post for proof :)"

Once the Concept Artists have done their amazing work the finished drawings are handed over to the 3d Art team.

3D Artists:

You peeps know mostly what these guys and girls do I talk about them enough, they take the concept art put it into a 3d modelling program like Maya or Blender and make the models for the drawings so for example, one person would make the player character model well the other makes the objects for the player character to hold the finshed models are handed over to riggers.

There's my buddy !

Riggers:
Riggers use a technique known as Skeletal Animation here is Wikipedia's description of the technique: "Skeletal animation is a technique in computer animation in which a character is represented in two parts: a surface representation used to draw the character (called skin or mesh) and a hierarchical set of interconnected bones (called the skeleton or rig) used to animate (pose and keyframe) the mesh. While this technique is often used to animate humans or more generally for organic modeling, it only serves to make the animation process more intuitive and the same technique can be used to control the deformation of any object — a spoon, a building, or a galaxy." - Wikipedia on Skeletal animation

The characters "rig" or bones are highlighted in green the animation can use these to control the models moves much like a puppet being on a string.

Rigging is a very important stage with out a rig the model would not be able to be animated easily a model needs a rig just like a human needs a skeleton.

And finally the....

Animators:

After the model is made and fully rigged it is handed over to the animator or team to create the animations for the models such as the famous walk cycle It is worth noting that these three jobs in some companies are all handled by one person like wise their could be a few modellers and only a few animators who would take on the role of rigging themselves as well, this is down to the type of studio for example a big company like Ubisoft will have multiple people doing all these jobs because they can afford to pay all the people where as in a indie company where staff numbers are often few staff may be called upon to do multiple roles and its not uncommon for a animator  to rig his/hers own models.

And like i promised last time heres another picture of my current model enjoy :)

Till next time.


Sources used in this post:
http://www.davidrevoy.com/data/images/portfolio/projects/2011-cgcookie/4_Kara_model-sheet_by_David_Revoy.jpg

Image two in this post is a picture of the character Abe from the Oddworld games series and is owned by Oddworld Inhabitants I do not own him or his design and do not intend to use this picture for the purposes of making money the image is used under  The Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.
Where the image was found: http://www.411mania.com/game_article_pictures/12313.jpg


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Sintel-hand.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeletal_animation

Simple Animations by Conor Scott is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.