3D Character Design & Animation
CHARACTER BACKGROUND
Name: no. 10
Height: 6ft 4
Weight: 200lbs
Backstory: the year is 2040. poverty and war have rampaged the world. most of the planet is
inhabitable because of the nuclear war between the leader of a foreign country and president of the
United States of America. A brave scientist has developed super solders to fight in the battle and
bring peace to the world. Project no.10 was genetically engineered to be better at everything then
any normal human and with the help of his armour he is used to Control and eliminate any
threats. Him and his team of super solders protect the streets and do whatever it takes to bring
piece back to the country.
INITIAL CONCEPTS
Insperation: From the initial idea of my character, I wanted to make a muscular character who was filled with
rage through fighting in the wars. For my character I wanted to choose my colours very carefully. I wanted to use shades of brown on my character to give of an earth like tone to the character and make him look more rugged. To contrast this however I wanted the armour to be a metallic
Initial concepts: To start off with the design of my character I drew up basic human shape and
decided where I wanted all the armour and under armour to fit. For the under armour, I was heavily
inspired by the look of the tesla bots, so I drew a rough sketch like that. For the main armour
however it was inspired by multiple inspirations, and I thought what would make sense and what
would be practical as a suit of armour. I settled with these basic shapes and a reference to what I
wanted to do later down the line.
For the helmet I went through a few designs. one of these was a face mask like scorpion from mortal
Kombat however I decided to setting with a mask that coves the full face to add more protection to
the wearer and
For the final design of the character, I wanted to draw a basic human figure from multiple angles so
it would be easier for me when I start modelling to visualise the character.
I started with an outline of a person and slowly built up what I wanted for the armour. I did a basic
outline in red so I could see what I had drawn. I filled in the character with the neutral colours I have
chosen before and made the visor and logo red to make them stand out.
I thought the back looked very bare, so I decided to give my character a cape. I believed this would
help my character look a lot better and when creating the cape, I would have more to talk about.
CHARACTER REFLECTION
To start off with the character animation I firstly began with editing my character that I have already
created. The reason for doing this was to lower the polygon count so that my computer would run
fine when rendering the final animations and to make things slightly easier for me.
I also used this time to fix up some issues that I had before with my character. For example, I did not
like the original texturing on the character and I felt like it look to clean. I changed this by adding a
more rustic looking metal to the texture to make it look more worn.
During this process I had issues with the cape and animation it, so I decided to delete it and come
back to it later after I have finished all the animations and add it as an extra level of detail.
RIGGING AND WEIGHT PAINTING
after importing my character into blender and fixing all my issues I had with the character I then built a basic scene for my character. I did not know if I will use this for the final however I wanted to add some lights to the scene and a backdrop.
To create the skeleton, I will use for the character initially stated with the middle hip boon as the root. This will be the main bone and the other bones will parent of this on. I then shaped and sized the bone to the position I liked and then added more bones to create the spine and then the neck of the character. Coming off that I then started the right arm with the bones going down the arm and then splitting to the fingers. For the fingers I used one bone and placed it inside each of the fingers. After making sure all the finger bones where in the right position I then subdivided the finger bones to create the little bones and resized and moved them to fit correctly. I then worked on the legs and make all the bones in there. I then had to name all the bones and add “.r” to the end of the name to distinguish if the bone was on the right or the left. I then mirrored the skeleton and renamed the bones on the other side to “.l”
after the bones where set in place I then parented them to the mesh so that they would control the mesh. A problem I had with this after though is that the mesh was being altered in places that I didn’t want it to be for example when you move the arm the chest and the lower belly moves
When starting weight painting, I wanted to begin with the helmet. As I believed this would be the easiest to do. I selected the bone that was going to affect the helmet and then painted the helmet fully in red as I wanted the whole thing to move then this bone is moved.
An issue I had to overcome was the under-armour mesh. While working in zbrush I didn’t do a good job on making the under armour so there were multiple layers to the armour with gaps in between. This resulted in the weight painting not working correctly as it was the gaps that wasn’t allowing me to paint the object fully to allow it to do what I required. To overcome this issue, I had to select all the outer faces and deleted everything else and then added a solidify modifier on blender to give the under-armour thickness. After doing this the painting process was a lot easier.
After finishing the ik for the rig. I then decided to come up with ideas of what I wanted to do with my animations. I wanted to try and do something unique for my character, so I was thinking of an action pose that involves the characters blades that mount on the side of the arm pieces. To start off with the blocking out I began with doing the simple poses that I would need for the animation.