Cartoon Character

[Veach]

Hey everyone,

So I’m a research assistant for one of the indiana university psych labs. My job in the lab is to make the stimuli for the experimenter I work for which happen to be 3D animations. Another person in the lab is looking to use Blender for some animations and I was looking into putting together a new character for his purposes. What this character has to do is sort of hang out in the bottom corner of the screen and interact with the kid as they do the experiment on the computer. I think the experiment involves showing a couple pictures and having the child pick one.

I think what this character needs to be capable of is simple mouth movements to sync with audio and also some basic waving, jumping, etc. I’m convinced that for time purposes the best way to go about the audio is just to have the mouth opening and closing repeatedly for animations with speech. That will mean the only RVKs needed to be set up are open mouth, closed mouth, smile, and of course the base key.

I found time tonight to put together the first draft of a head for this character, and I was hoping to get some feedback on whether this is actually “cartoony” enough. I’m also looking for the usual crits on the modeling as well.

The body to accompany the head will be made up of very slender limbs and a slender neck. The guy will be disproportionally tall and skinny just enough so that he seems far enough from a bad attempt at realistic modelling.

I hope this all makes sense. It’s really late right now and I’m in pretty bad need of sleep.

Thanks,
Anthony

[code_astro]

to me, the shape of the head looks very strange at the moment. very pointy mouth and the nose is a little odd.

I suggest doing a quick sketch (front and side) and use TorQs tutorial. TorQs tutorial is an excellent method for modeling and you will get far better results in a shorter space of time than starting with a box.

[Veach]

Thanks for the reply.

The shape was supposed to be very exaggerated, but if other people say it’s too much then I’ll look into better shapes. I just want this character to be something that kids will respond well to.

I reworked a little bit of the nose, added (poorly made) eyes, and changed some other small details.

–EDIT–

I put in a different render. I didn’t feel a need to make a new post because the original picture in this one wasn’t much of a change. Let me know what you think.

-Anthony

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