Premise: Character Design (Part 9)

The next challenge was to see how these designs could transfer onto the base models that I intend to create without appearing to be too similar. I started by drawing the basic shapes of the human, dog, cat, and teacher models. As I proceeded, however, I realised that I likely wouldn't even need to use the teacher character to illustrate that certain scenes would be taking place inside of a lesson. 

This meant that when I proceeded, I simply drew out the children characters and removed the teacher. In regards to the children characters, I made sure that I considered slightly different variants of such that could be used for different outfits that I had already designed including creating a difference between those that wore dresses and those that don't. While I don't believe that the models would look like this as they need quite a lot of tweaking and further consideration of how I would go about modelling the head shapes in particular, I made sure that they would simply fit the purpose of experimenting with and comparing the different character designs. 

I drew out Evie's human form, Kris, and the original best friend, who I decided to name Lottie, first. While I don't yet know if I'll actually need to model and animate Lottie as she is only shown in photographs, but I tweaked her design a little bit by giving her a fringe, removing her freckles and replacing it with a blush pattern, edited her socks, and included her for comparison purposes. I will likely adjust each of these characters' heights for some variation later on, possibly by making Lottie and Evie slightly taller but to different extents. 

I continued with the other classmates. I feel like I was somewhat successful in diversifying the different characters even with the same/similar models, and this is heightened by the varying colour palettes and different ways that the clothes have been drawn on using the model that I made. I feel like it would be appropriate that, given the time, I would be able to model different parts onto the different characters such as hair and accessories. 

I also used some of the designs from the last set of character designs that I wouldn't have used due to them being rabbits and I worked on them to create new ones - these are the green cat girl, the Border Collie boy, and the Australian Shepherd girl. I am aware that time may be a problem and I might not get around to being able to individually rig the faces and parts of all of these characters, so some of the designs might not make it into the final film, but I preferred having too many characters to choose from as opposed to not enough, especially given the school environment.