Second Rapid Ideation Session Day 1: Character sheet

I have finalised the design for the Curupira fairly quickly to come up with my own Curupira design, I used numerous other people’s artwork which depicts the Curupira as reference.

Here are a few examples of depictions of the Curupira that I used as reference to deisgn my own

Once I had read up on the Curupira and collected a range of Curupira images, I used these to sketch my own version of the character.

This is my initial sketch of the Curupira

Once I was satisfied with the design of the Curupira, I scanned the drawing into my computer and I used it to make a Character sheet (Mansur, R., 2008) that I would use as reference to model the character in Blender. I drew this in Photoshop (Adobe Photoshop 2021, 2021) and here is how it looks.

This Character Sheet presents the Curupira in front view and side view. I have drawn him in a T-pose with his arms out as this is how I will need to model him so that I can add the joints to his arms that allow him to move them.

You may notice that his feet pointing in the opposite direction. This is not a mistake, the Curupira is always depicted with their feet pointing backwards, although their knees bend in the same direction as ours. This aspect of the character design is going to pose an interesting challenge at the animation stage as I will need to work out how he will walk.

I have not made the character design too elabroate as I need to keep it as simple as possible so that I have a better chance of finishing this project, but I believe the design is appealing enough to create an interesting character.

I have also used this stage to work out the colour scheme of my character and I have produced full colour versions of the character design.

I have largely stuck to similar colours that appear in both written and visual interpretations of the character, which are different shades of green and brown, as well as shades of orange and red.

The next stage of this project is to bring this character sheet into a project in Blender and then to begin modelling my character.

Throughout this project, I shall be using Darrin Lile’s Linkedin Learning course on Character Creation in Blender 2.8 (Lile, D., 2020) as a basis for developing my knowledge of various areas in Blender, namely modelling, rigging, UV mapping, texturing, lighting and rendering.

I have chosen this course is it is very detailed and it would give me a lot of opportunity to learn and explore many different aspects of the 3D production pipeline at my own pace. I believe this would make a good aid for helping me build my own character.

This course is orientated around creating an astronaut type character. This character is of course radically different to the character I intend to create, so I will be taking ownership of this course when making the character. I will make use of all aspects of the course which apply broadly to character creation in all cases, but anything that may be only specific to the creation of this particular character such as the construction of the astronaut uniform or helmet, I will leave out. I will also attempt to adapt aspects of the course to help me build certain features of my Curupira character, such as his necklace, hair or his belt made of leaves.

Kanban board

Since completing this task, I have moved the tasks, of design finalisation and creating the character board to the done list, as these are now done. Modelling has been moved to the In Progress list as this is the immediate next step.

Github repository

I have added the PSD and PNG files for the character sheet, as well as the front and side view in separate files to s subfolder called ‘Character Sheets’

I have committed this directory to the ‘main’ branch of my repository and they been pushed to my public repository, which is viewable here.

References

Adobe. 2021. Adobe Photoshop 2021 (2021). [Software]

Lile, D., 2020. Blender 2.8 Character Creation | LinkedIn Learning, formerly Lynda.com. [online] LinkedIn Learning. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/blender-2-8-character-creation/ [Accessed 11 March 2021].

Mansur, R., 2008. How to Draw front & side views of a character for 3D modeling. [online] WonderHowTo. Available at: <https://drawing.wonderhowto.com/how-to/draw-front-side-views-character-for-3d-modeling-197246/> [Accessed 11 March 2021].

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