The cat character, I realised, had completely wrong eyes, so a quick adjustment of those, exaggerate the overbite a bit more, tweak the colour, and it started to look better.These little tweaks and adjustments to the characters are all part of the process, even after having a character sketch signed off, once it comes to life in three dimensions, some things don’t work, some things need moving or making bigger etc… In the early stages, this is a natural and simple evolution of the character. Amends further into the process can really complicate things.
We’ve seen an increase of clients bringing us characters which have been designed (I resisted the urge to put that in quotation marks) using AI. These invariably are presented to us along with a list of problems that need fixing. AI might be a good tool for visualising an idea for a pitch, but it also introduces new problems and challenges to the optimal workflow.
This isn’t a moan about people using AI to come up with ideas, if it helps win a pitch, then who am I to complain. However, there needs to be an awareness of how time saved at this stage will likely lead to more time needed in the following stages.
We still have to follow our normal complete character design process when it comes to turning these into a production ready character. We may have a close to signed off image, but we need to sketch out the character, amending, adding or removing any elements that the AI has produced wrongly. Then we need to model and texture it, which throws up the biggest problem of this new workflow. The client has seen a nicely rendered “finished” image. They know things need tweaking, but their expectations are set at “finished product” from the start. In our normal workflow, lighting and final texturing comes further down the line, but if a client isn’t familiar with the process, their expectation has been raised to want to see a final quality render at every stage. If we have to retexture a character every time an amend is made, the process becomes time consuming and eats away at the budget.
Anyway, back to the monsters.
Revisiting the characters after a short break doing “real work” – the big, pink monster really started to feel like it was working. Once I started playing with facial expressions and movement, he seemed to grow into this slightly daft, friendly character. The other two in comparison seemed to be lacking something. They feel a little contrived, as if they’re trying too hard to be interesting.
So I decided to just focus on Barry (the pink one’s called Barry now), and make some tests of him in the Manchester skyline.
