For my Experimental Design Module I choose to look at both Experimental Character Design and 2D Rigging as my skill choices to better enhance my skills for future employment after Graduation. For this assignment I hoped to improve on my previous Character Design skills from my undergraduate degree which primarily focused on anime-esque designs rather than designs that would be desirable for local studios. To do this I wanted to start from scratch and look at the character design pipeline and I also choose to study and use the style of Steven Universe and cartoon that aired on Cartoon Network. For my 2D rigging I wanted to focus on the industry standard of Toon Boom Harmony rigs that utilise deformers and pegs to allow seamless animating. Depending on what career route I take, learning to rig will be a huge benefit not only to become a rigger but also allows me to understand how to design better characters and also would benefit my knowledge on using rigs to animate with.
For my Character Design portion, I choose to use one of the flowers from the beginning of the Codex Seraphinianus. Using previous pipeline knowledge, I knew all designs must start with an idea, so I began to brainstorm the type of character I wanted to create. I had the idea of making my character: mysterious, a femme fatale, envious and elegant. I envisioned the top of the flower as either a large hat that would hide the face or as an oversized umbrella, similar to ones Japanese Geishas would use.
Like stated above I wanted to start from scratch again with my design knowledge, so I read through Stephen Silvers ‘The Silver Way’ to get a better idea of how an industry professional designs his characters. I also went onto YouTube and looked at the tutorials by Janelle Knight and Marco Bucci. By looking at these three different people I noticed that not every Character Designer worked with the same methods, Janelle would start with a sketch then move into silhouettes, Marco used gesture drawings and lines of actions with silhouettes, while Stephen worked with shapes instead of blocking silhouettes and his 5 Phases of design. I decided I would try all of these methods to figure out what would be the best approach to my style of design that would speed up how fast I could work for future employers.
From here I created some moodboards and experimented with the different methods that I had researched. Through my time working with these methods I was starting to pick up on what I found worked for me and what didn’t. Both Marco and Janelle really utilized their silhouettes when you broke down their methods, they just had different approaches. While I tried the silhouette method as seen below, I found that silhouettes were limiting my creativity, and my brain couldn’t fully visualize how the character was looking what it was all just black shapes. When I finally drew over the silhouettes I was still struggling to visualize and ultimately struggled to figure out clothing styles, proportions, etc. This method just wasn’t working out for me. At this stage I was stuck in my head that silhouettes had to be my method but Aodhan reassured me that there are many different ways to design characters and what works for one person won’t work for another. With that in mind, I finally tried Stephens method of shapes and found myself loosening up more and allowing myself to create more freely. I used his 5 Phases and broke down my character into; Story, Gesture, Design, Form and Detail.
(Click Through Slideshow)
(Click Through Slideshow)
During this stage of development of clothing, I was struggling to keep close to the Steven Universe style. Aodhan sat down with me and provided feedback. He was able to talk me through and breakdown the style. We noticed this show focused on simple and appealing shapes that often didn’t overlap too much. Sleeves on arms would have at least one straight edge leading into the hand and the same applied to the likes of legs and boots. Aodhan also talked about proportional contrast which was also mentioned in Stephen Silvers book. At this stage I spoke to Aodhan about my rigging and how we talked about a walk cycle, but using the shapes I found I really liked hiding the legs with a dress that either hugged her figure or stuck out like a Victorian dress with a hump. We agreed that with the length of time I had doing a walk cycle could be hard anyways and the style of dress really suited the type of character I wanted to create. We also looked at some other character designers as inspiration, who had similar styles to what I was using. With Aodhans feedback I was feeling much more confident in how I could design this character and I was finally starting to visualize her.
Below you can see the rest of the design process, the final turnaround, and the expression sheets. For the portfolio, I referred to Jackie Droujko on YouTube and her Character Design Portfolio video. I made sure to layout all of my design work cleanly and put its title, my name and my contact info for employers. If I had more time, I would have added in a pose sheet which a lot of industry professionals have to show off the characters way of movement to animators. I also would have added in another 3 / 4 view in the turnaround but from behind, I was stuck for time and couldn’t fully wrap my head around how her body would look from that angle. Both of these were mentioned in The Silver Ways Phase 4.
Overall, I’m proud of this design and I believe I have started to move away from anime styles and show that I can be diverse with my drawings to employers. I was able to follow along with industry professionals’ techniques, find a method that worked best for me and lay out my portfolio in a clean professional manner. I could’ve added some more industry standard design sheets to my portfolio but due to a lack of time I wasn’t able to.
For my rigging portion of the assessment, I sat down with Aodhan who was able to point me in the direction of different areas to look to understand the pipeline. My first option was using Toon Boom Harmonys rigging courses which would explain how the software worked along with its rigging techniques, my second option was following along with industry professional Kyu-Bum-Lee who designed the Olive Rig and worked for companies like Disney XD and Cartoon Network. Aodhan encouraged me to follow Kyu’s livestream tutorial of the Olive Rig as he showed off industry standard techniques that shortened the rigging process and kept it to a high standard. Kyu’s first 2 livestreams also featured him talking indepth about the techniques he was using which would allow me to understand Toon Boom better. However, this isn’t to say I didn’t use Toon Booms guides. While Kyu explained things, he didn’t explain deformers, nor did he explain some of the shortcut keys he was using. I found myself referring to Toon Booms guides when I needed a bit more explaining.
Kyu’s tutorials taught me about all the different types of nodes, what order to work in when drawing the parts, how to use cutters and alphas and ultimately how to work faster to make sure rigs got done in good time for studios. I found his methods of working quite easy to follow and with practice I was beginning to understand the different nodes better. Eventually his tutorials had little explanation and at this point I stopped following them and worked on my own. While working on my own I had some troubleshooting issues but with time I was able to figure out what I was doing wrong…
One of the first issues I had was understanding the neck hierarchy. Kyu’s Olive rig had a scarf covering where the neck would meet the neck-line of her shirt whereas my rig showed where the neckline was on the dress. I went into Toon Booms Rig course and discovered you need to make both a ‘under torso neck’ and an ‘above torso neck’ where you would then place a cutter to conjoin the two necks seamlessly. It took me some time to figure out where to place each of the pieces in my nodes with their respective pegs and composites, but I messed around with the wires and eventually figured it out. I also looked at the Olive Rig in Toon Boom itself and used it as a base for me to lay out my pegs properly as I also had issues setting up the mouth. I also learnt at this stage how to set up my cutters properly as I was having issues with cutters removing line thickness, it was a simple solution of taking the line-art node out of the cutter composite.
Old Mouth Vs New Node
Fixing Line Thickness Issue
The second biggest issue I faced was deformers. Kyu’s tutorials barely covered deformers and if they did, he didn’t explain it well enough. When doing her hat tassels, I knew I needed deformers to make the strings move properly so I looked at a tutorial by Onion Skin who was able to explain Toon Booms deformer menu and explained what was standard in the industry to use, Envelope Deformers. However, during my early stages I only added deformers to the tassels. When I used the pegs to check if my rig was working, I noticed gaps and didn’t know how I would fix that. Before submission I looked at Rig Demo videos for my own Demo and noticed other rigs all had deformers on the body parts. I realised I had left out one of the most important parts of the rig. I quickly watched Onion Skins video again along with one of the official Toon Boom Animation tutorial videos and set to work adding deformers. This fixed all the problems I was having with parts of my rig not connecting when animating and would allow animators more flexibility with my rig if it were used professionally
Deformers
When looking at different rigs in Toon Boom and following tutorials I picked up on some techniques that I didn’t have time to fully utilise. I understood that for rigs to talk I needed to design and rig several different mouth pieces that would not only be in place for doing lip syncs but would also be used to express emotions. Sadly, I did not have time to draw a character sheet for lip syncing as I was pressed for time. However, to learn what that process of rigging would entail, I used the same process to create 5 assets for the eyelids that animators could switch between. This means I now know how to do this and, in the future, I will know how to create my mouth pieces. The same applies to hands and feet, riggers will draw several different hand and feet positions sometimes 30-40 different pieces to give animators lots to work with in their animations. Like the mouth, I didn’t have time to make these pieces but if I had more time, I would’ve practiced making the different hands/feet and rigging them up properly to my model.
For my final Demo Video, I understand that most people will show off their rigs by quickly going through their node menus, showing how the character bends, all its deformers, etc. They also will show a test of the character animated to give other animators a clear visualisation of the rig in motion to see if it fits their needs. I was able to get my demo video filmed and edited but due to the limited time I had left I had no time to do an animation for my rig. This was disappointing as I was eager to see how well I could animate my character and it would be a good test to see if the rigging was up to standard.
Overall though I am very pleased with this assignment. I was able to improve on my previous Character Design skills by going back to the basics and reteaching myself. I finally found a method of designing Characters that fits my needs but also still falls under industry standards and utilises key skills needed like using lines of action, gestures, understanding form/shapes, etc. For my rigging I’m very proud of my rig since it’s the first one I’ve done on Toon Boom. In the end I understood the software enough at times to troubleshoot my own problems by thinking carefully through what each node did on the menu. I understand I’m missing some important parts like mouth and hand pieces but I know how I would rig them in the future so I believed I have learned enough basic skills to use the industry.
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