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Stupid Mr Whoopsie Name
Registered User, ClubPA regular
Registered User, ClubPA regular
It's time to dust off my "New Thread" button and ask for some crits on a couple of character and design elements. Some of you may recall this pitch poster contest back in June that yielded some pretty favorable results.
Not too shabby for literally overnight work (and Jury Duty the next morning). Winning the contest has helped us gain some clout around school so that we're not producing a three minute short film, in house, based on our pitch. What this means for me is that I get to spend more than a frenzied evening actually developing the character models. I've got a couple to post in thread gradually, but I'd like to start with Monkey first.
I won't give much of an introduction, other than, of the models below which does your gut prefer? Square chin or Pointy chin?
In addition to that, what other general critiques does anyone have. What works for you, what doesn't? I wanna let people answer before I discuss anything about the character. Thanks in advance.
Not too shabby for literally overnight work (and Jury Duty the next morning). Winning the contest has helped us gain some clout around school so that we're not producing a three minute short film, in house, based on our pitch. What this means for me is that I get to spend more than a frenzied evening actually developing the character models. I've got a couple to post in thread gradually, but I'd like to start with Monkey first.
I won't give much of an introduction, other than, of the models below which does your gut prefer? Square chin or Pointy chin?
In addition to that, what other general critiques does anyone have. What works for you, what doesn't? I wanna let people answer before I discuss anything about the character. Thanks in advance.
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edit: I think I might know what it is that's bothering me- the line weights aren't very suggestive of the form.
In addition, I think the line weight really shows just how many times these designs have been edited with the committee's suggestions.
also the right mutton chop just looks funky
He looks like a more respectable intelligent monkey with a cut chin than an effeminate one.
more confident maybe
ughhhh.
I like the pointy chin better, but I liked the design from the original poster the best, with the unique sort of muzzle shape. Square chin makes me think of Hellboy, (and I like Hellboy, but it doesn't seem like it fits the suit-wearing monkey character), pointy makes him look more clever and less thuggish.
Also I liked the original eye design better, where it felt more like the eyes were spherical objects- they seem to have gotten flattened out to where they're more just 2d shapes, like Dragonball Z eyes.
So my advice is fuck the committee, basically.
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If I had to choose however, I'd say the pointy chin one.
PS: Do you still go to AAU? I start in February. What department are you in?
Yes. Yes. It has been, at times, very frustrating. But it's also been very beneficial. Mostly frustrating at the moment.
So, taking some of the suggestions into consideration I sat back down and tried to rework Monkey's muzzle. I'm taking him more away from his Chimp look and trying to make him more of a, well, Monkey. As ambiguous as his exact species type may be. I don't want him to look thuggish, but rather crafty and cunning. Below, my latest attempts and then a bit more about who his character is.
The Monkey in full color ended up being my favorite pic. He's got that quality that suggests perhaps his mind is busy carving away at something grand (Also, one Internet Dollar do anyone who can tell me the actor he resembles there).
Who is this Gentleman Monkey?
When Robot arrives, Monkey is quick to befriend him and they begin a tradition of reading together during the after hours of the RBM's normal operations. The 3 minute short prologue we are producing is about Monkey & Robot's escape from the RBM after they discover some sinister plans to which they will both surely meet their ends.
He wears a suit and has a cane, and I'm pretty certain he'll be animated with a hunched-over walk/appearance. This is one of my motivations to make Monkey's appearance be on the rather young side, because it will counter balance what will otherwise make Monkey appear as an old man. He also runs around with a 16 year old girl later in the series, so the younger he can look, the less pederast it'll come across
Suggestions and opinions are greatly desired and appreciated.
I do indeed, and with any luck I'll be able to figure out my financing/working/living dilemma and keep going there. Department wise, I'm officially Illustration, though with this project I've been doing a considerable amount of moonlighting in Animation.
If so, I'd decrease the height of the eyes from the bottom, the amount that they're open, so that they look more deceptively cunning.
EDIT: Oh man, both of those guys are great refs for drawing bowler hats!
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Here are the latest revisions. Something I've had to keep in mind the whole time I've been designing is that the characters are to be recreated as 3D models eventually.
Monkey's whole character trait is that he is a super-intelligent simian that has been held in captivity by the Royal British Museum for years. He yearns to be more human (or rather, more Gentlemanly), and tends to over reach when acting the part. He's super smart, but naive and a lot of this derives from his captivity. He often thinks he knows best simply because he once read a book on the subject, and fails to see where real world experience is often more valuable.
The epitome of this is what I tried to capture in the portrait above.
People generally liked the pointy chin better, as did I. As Ahab mentioned, he looked like a thug with the square chin and of course as I worked on these that's all I could see. So I tried to find the best balance between the two of them, which I feel like I achieved.
For example, in that last one, the cheekbones on each side don't tie together in perspective, and one appears to be much more prominent than the other. And on the left eye, the line defining his upper lid goes straight across, rather than showing a curve around the eyeball, thus flattening the entire area out. Also the bottom lids sort of sit at different angles, and not in a way that makes me thing that's a result of an expression- it just makes it look like you drew one eye, then forgot what shape you made it when you drew the other.
3d guys can't really use 2d design tricks, so you have to give them something robust and unambiguous in terms of form. Like if you tried to replicate the expressions here in 3d, there are so many lines here that are hard to figure out how they relate to form, it would probably make it look like the monkey's face is melting.
This is why I thought the original poster design was the best- and remains the best- of all of these. It's simple, it's expressive, it's solidly constructed, which means it'd be much better to animate with, in 2d or 3d. It feels like you're being pushed away from what's important by being made to focus on nitpicky stuff.
Did some quickie sketches here going off your latest, trying to maintain volume by making the eyes obviously spherical, by tying the volume of the cheekbones together as a solid sort of curved box shape, and having the muzzle be a kind of egg. Broke the line from the cheekbone going to the brow up into two sections to get the added volume of the underside of the brow. Also added a bit of brow ridge when the expression demands it, having the brows defined only by a single line feels like it could feel weak in certain cases. Threw him into a couple poses to see how it holds up under strain.
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A couple of those look like you, and I find that mildly amusing.
I'm going to go back and try to make some readjustments with those things in mind. Thanks.
I would suggest playing up the expressions a bit, as Bacon's seem a bit too subtle for an animated show.
I don't know if you've got the Preston Blair book Cartoon Animation, but what I'm talking about is basically what he goes over in the first part of it. Constructing a drawing with forms, actually going in and drawing the head as a sphere, eyes as spheres, cheeks as a curved rectangle shape, muzzle as an egg, and making sure that those simple geometric shapes read solidly in perspective, before worrying about stuff like eyelids or brows or lips or whatever.
Because I've got the basic form construction, when I do add those details, it will just be a matter of wrapping them around the forms I've already got. I wrap the eyelids around the eye, I wrap the lips around the muzzle egg, I wrap the brows across the cranium. Everything correlates to the centerline of the head, and every feature is correlated across to the other side of the face- left tearduct to right tearduct, left corner of the mouth to the right, top of brow to top of brow, tip of ear to tip of ear- it all runs across in the same perspective. Every new detail follows the same perspective and principles as the basic forms- for example, I could think of the hair on the bottom of the face as two separate triangles of fur, with nothing to do with each other; but to increase the idea of solidity, I connected them together when drawing, making for a big, solid banana shape. It's easier to wrap my head around figuring out how a banana is going to rotate in space, than it would be to figure out how two ambiguous triangularish shapes would. I could think of the nose as a line running down the face with a pointy shape at the end, but I don't know how that would work from every possible angle- instead, I worked it out as a box.
Now, obviously, things are going to change when you start putting expressions in there, but certain things that never move (ie: cheekbones, tearducts, ears, etc.) need to be put in their proper perspective, and having the ability to solidly construct figures in this manner is going to be essential to being able to pull off those expressions without losing solidity.
Being able to draw basic forms in perspective accurately means I can throw my figure at any angle in perspective and maintain a solid feeling result, something that would be impossible if you only concern yourself with lines. You can have some pretty lines that look great from one angle, but if you can't move it in space, you're going to end up with some really really bad animation/models as a result.
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And after thankful input, it now reads better as:
For its purpose as Barnaby Bros Flying Circus, it's perfect, but I'm trying to adapt it into an overall series logo, with the title being something akin to "Monkey & Robot GO!". I really like the branding of the Soaring Bigtop, but it feels really flat and not very dynamic, and even more so when I just wrap some text around it.
I'm starting to hit a brick wall on this one and wonder if anyone has any input they can help sparks some new ideas with. At this point, honestly, nothing is out-of-bounds (except weiners).
This is some of the rough attempts I've come up with, take a look. The idea remains to evoke the late 1800's, and that era circus/carnival culture, but also trying to be dynamic. It's either a good jumping off point or a lesson in what not to do :?
I don't know if these will help.
All 3 of them are far too cluttered and unbalanced.
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I like the overall shape of the logo though!
Here are some of the works I noodled with:
Here's a WIP from an upcoming poster (though there's more to it than this now, but its on another HD apparently):
And now for the exciting stuff! Some model sheets and finished renders!
This is the model sheet/color study I did and passed along to one of my modelers, who in turn knocked it out of the fuckin' park!
I'm utterly in
Lastly, our intrepid hero is finished!
Somewhere I have the model sheet for this I'll update with later so you can see the comparison. Once again, the modeler took my designs and through a complicated ritual of magic and alchemy created a brilliant model.
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More to come as I get the renders back and can compile them.
http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Guenter
Hey, what happened to this?
Oh, and I think I told you this, but these are looking awesome. Can't wait to see it all in motion.
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The powers-that-be shut the idea down in the 11th hour, but fortunately our department director is taking steps to avoid that sort of fallout in the future.
EWA, this is for a short film based on a cartoon idea I'm helping put together at school. With any luck it'll lead to something and eventually I'll be making that Lando Calrission money...