How To Design Cute Characters

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How To Design Cute Characters – Human design, for me, is one of the most important stages before production. It can be compared to the casting process of a live-action film, where you have to choose the perfect actor to work with you before, during and after the first film (distribution and promotion). More importantly, they are the ones we want to follow as the story unfolds and in any other mini-series/series. If we make a bad choice, this can destroy the success of the game, because if the audience does not relate to the characters, they will not be able to create an emotional connection with the story. That’s why it’s important to take enough time to explore the possibilities and trust the decision that feels right.

Okay, okay, that’s very interesting, but how do you translate that idea into animation? Casting is just choosing voice actors! It’s great?

How To Design Cute Characters

The truth is that I thought so too, but after thinking and studying how to play in movies and comparing them to games, I realized that they were the same, but with an interesting difference : In live action comes your characters. which is almost predetermined. You see a lot of people to choose from, with different features, which you can change a little by changing clothes, hairstyles or even asking them to change their body by exercising / fat, etc. If we see the cold, it is a catalog of templates, where you end up choosing the best combination of acting skills, physical characteristics, and unique qualities that the actor/actress has to offer about them.

Children’s Book Character Design Process :: Behance

But in animation, we have the unique feature of having the control to create from scratch EVERYTHING in character. We can choose and combine different features from different sources until we get the perfect shape. The problem with this is that we don’t get a chance to see a wide variety of pre-planned opportunities unfolding before us. We have to do them ourselves.

Now I have to be honest. As I said before, my personal projects usually start with characters. Every once in a while, someone I focus on between my pictures pops up and seems interesting enough to write a story about them and spend years of my life crafting a project to tell that story.

First player footage (late 2013/early 2014). I’ll be honest, Kat looked really cute, but I never learned how to pull Doug straight because of his mouth.

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Now in the matter of preaching, when people ask me why I choose a cat and a dog, I have no answer. After the first picture appeared, I didn’t think about whether it would be good to make them rabbit and dog or mouse and cat or dog and raccoon, or fish or dinosaurs or people, etc. .

Cute Character Design Of A Little Cat Wearing Headphones And Flying A Plane Made Out Of A Game Controller Stock Illustration

But since I’m a human design teacher, I can’t stop walking you through all the steps that usually fit my design style. Again, it’s something I use to some extent in all client work I receive.

This event is known in the big studios as “Blue Sky” because the sky is the limit. You will often find a physical or mental description of the character, but it is not necessary to stick to them 100% in all your sketches, as the important thing is to explore the most possible possibilities for the character and hope there is a big difference between. see. What does this character look like? Tall/short, fat/thin, muscular/skinny, white/black/Asian/Latino? Even in some cases, you can try to do the opposite of your assigned gender.

Since I left this forum while doing Here’s a Design, I made a few new pictures to illustrate my point 😉

This is what I would do at the beginning of a project if I hadn’t decided on a character.

Cute Character Design Wearing An Otter Costume 45871705 Vector Art At Vecteezy

This category can go hand in hand with the previous one, but I think that sometimes it is very necessary to combine the use of references, whether for style or research. On the other hand, it is better to compare the images you created in the previous step with the references of your style, and measure how far / how close they are to them, and make them the same or similar vary depending on what you want. It’s important to learn what makes these designs work and grab your attention so you can try to incorporate that into your work.

Corgi cat and dog photo reference. Below: Reference for style from “Good-bye Chunky Rice” by Craig Thompson and “I’ll go crazy if I’m not crazy tonight” by David O’Reilly

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On the other hand, it is possible that in the review stage you are not concerned with drawing in the right way, since you tend to do it from the ideas and the first thoughts of what we are drawing. If we look at references, we can change or exaggerate aspects of our original designs, in order to improve them and make them more interesting.

For example, when I drew the first Kat & Doug pictures, I didn’t know what the spinning cat/dog looked like from a positional perspective, and that’s something I needed to improve on. Also, how the ears were connected to the head was a mystery to me and was something that was needed to make them stronger and improve the design.

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However, it is important to emphasize that my goal was not to create something real, so I took some parts that I was interested in and discarded others. For example, the size of the eyes, the actual shape of the cat’s mouth, the length of the mouth, etc.

Pictures of Kat and Doug interacting. It is important to draw the characters that appear during the design. It’s hard to know if they’re working if you don’t.

Once we’ve settled on a design, it’s time to explore ways to polish it. We already have a lot of theme features available, and now we should try to make them as attractive as possible.

This means trying to understand and create the rhythm of the design, simplifying the shapes so that the design flows well and maybe going back and trying to include elements of our references that can improve the quality of our designs.

Cute Cartoon Characters Generator

In this case I didn’t polish the designs too much, but with this piece I decided on the size of the characters, with stylized shapes and larger heads. Later, this design would be changed when it was converted to CG during production, including the decision to lower the heads so that they would look more realistic and a little cartoonish / chibi.

The final stage of the character design will be the most technical: prepare the designs so that the modelers can use them as a reference to convert them to 3d later, or the animators can animate them in 2D . Here you are also created and decide on the sentence, poem and oral agreement page.

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Model papers for Kat and Doug. In the end, the body shapes remained pretty much the same, but the heads/faces had an extensive process of trial and error.

In this case of the Design, I have to admit that the model sheets were traced back from the first 3D model I made, as I knew we were going to go back and polish the design, and it was only necessary because the funding request required them. In retrospect, I should have created a new model sheet before creating the new 3D models, but I’ll talk about the challenges of converting a 2D design to 3D in a future post.

Cute Little Bird Cartoon Character Vector Illustration Design. Eps10 33484384 Vector Art At Vecteezy

As an additional event, I would like to talk a little about the costumes of the players. In the first stages I drew them in their normal clothes, but during the story they had to change clothes several times. I would love to design full outfits for each of them, but as you get deeper into the process, you start to recognize the limitations and you start to discount the designs based on the authenticity of the production.

And the reality was that the more costume changes we had, the more time and money we had to spend on modeling and executing. So I only ordered 4 outfits per character.

I don’t know much about fashion, so looking for references was key. I stocked up on my favorite stores, like Modcloth and Asos, for Kat’s clothes. Unfortunately, I didn’t look up many references for Doug, as I resigned myself to the stigma that there aren’t many options in menswear, but I’d like to seek advice in that area next time, to break the mold. that.

This is where the work of Meli Yensen (our supporting actress) came in, providing many opportunities for one of Kat’s work outfits. Having more options helped to understand what made sense and what didn’t about the character. Unfortunately sometimes the design was perfect but it would render parts that would be difficult to CG and had to be scrapped.

Grids For Creating Cute Characters By Spasibenko Art

During the process, it is important to ask yourself what kind of people you want to communicate with, and what internal components

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