I hadn't quite gotten round to uploading the work that I'd completed over the summer and have been working on over the last few weeks, but I had begun to refine my short and all of the work that I had completed for the Premise project, starting with considering the head shapes of the characters in more detail.
The characters that needed reworking most urgently were the human characters; I quickly came to the realisation that a pointed nose and naturally structured face was likely going to be difficult to work with since my characters (both human and non-human) were going to have 2D facial rigs as opposed to a 3D rig like Jetpack Jones'. This led me to begin thinking about using simpler, softer shapes that gave the designs a slightly more geometric look overall.
The main character was the base that I used as they are featured the most often; of the three designs above, the one that I chose to proceed with afterwards was closest to the first (with some influence from the third). I felt that the middle design wasn't really pleasing to look at and that maybe the third was a little too sharp.
As a reference, I began to look at how the technique that I am looking to achieve has already been applied to cartoons that I enjoy. The most prominent of these was The Amazing World of Gumball, which makes use of both Adobe and Autodesk software including Maya as it combines various different art and animation styles as part of its aesthetic. All of the characters in the show are very expressive and most are very geometric in their designs to the point that they could be considered fairly abstract-looking.
I noticed that, when watching the show, a lot of the 3D characters use the same and similar techniques that I am aiming for: 2D features are rigged onto their face or added in during the compositing stages. The above screenshot is an example of one of these characters; Jamie (on the right), while her nose appears to be a 3D object that is a part of the model, the rest of her face and all of her expressions I assume are created using a 2D rig. Other characters take this to an extreme as some of them even have clothes that can be altered using the same or a similar technique.
When looking back to my Premise project, I wrote a piece at the start where I was asked to examine different shows that I enjoyed and incorporate them into my influences for the Premise project and beyond. Besides the above example, I also revisited other shows such as Gravity Falls and Regular Show for the purpose of studying how these shows make use of camera angles. I found that these shows, and Gumball in particular, make use of specific techniques wherein characters are almost never seen from full profile or front views, with the illusion being created by having characters tilted towards the camera and generally following a three-quarter-angle view unless it is being used for a gag, to hone in on specific details, or to enhance the emotion of a scene (usually when trying to make something seem more dramatic).
Regardless, I still sketched out a set of angles for my main character as well as the non-human characters (or at least the bases for them plus testing it out with Evie). Even if I wouldn't be using the front or profile views as much as others, I still wanted to make sure that they looked decent and found it beneficial for me to get a better understanding the characters from different angles before I would inevitably move on to creating orthographs for them.
For the cat designs, I decided to settle on using one of the classmates' face shapes (the blue cat's design) to proceed instead of the face shape that I had already been using for Evie. I figured that it wouldn't work as well with any other characters besides her, and the slightly curved cheek matches better with Evie's human form (and the human model in general) so the change between them would be a lot less stark. To make sure of this, I edited the cat base to fit with Evie's design as seen above. The dog model, on the other hand, required a little less work and was based more off of a combination between the red Dalmatian and yellow dog's designs.
After this, I moved on to redesigning and finalising the cast of characters that will appear in my film.
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