Drawn and Quartered

Yup. It’s been a while since my last post. Balancing work with everything else leaves me little time to work on my project. Even though I missed my original deadline, I still plan to finish everything by the end of the year. I couldn’t stop, even if I wanted to. I’m a bit obsessive in that way.

Since I have the action mapped out with the animatic and the pre-viz, the next thing that I needed to do was to figure out what these characters looked like. 

So I sketched out drawings for both the bull and the bear character.
I’ll use these sketches as a guide when I build the 3D models. 

There’s, of course, going to be some changes when these are finally built but the overall look and feel
should be very close.

 

I wanted to sketch out the characters so I could see what they looked like at different angles. I also wanted the drawings to be consistent. In order to do this, I used a stand-in that I could turn in different directions and use to help me keep the size of my characters the same at every turn. Traditionally, artist would use a wooden mannequin to aid with poses and perspective.

 

In this case I decided to use a digital version of the mannequin. I opened my 3D application and placed the mannequin in the scene and posed it according to how I wanted to draw my characters and then I placed a camera on a circular path around the mannequin and then rendered or took a snapshot for each angle. 

I then took all of those frames into Photoshop and lined up the actors and arranged them on their own layer.

I then dimmed that layer so that I could sketch my characters on top. 

  




Then I turned off the mannequin layer and then colored in the lines of my sketch. I did this with both the bull and the bear layer.

More to come.