First up we have Yellow.
I am not convinced I have captured the original drawing very well, but in principle, it works just as well as the first character tests.
Next we have number 47.
I am very happy with how this one turned out... although the head looks a bit odd from the front. The arms and legs are completely flat too.
It has occurred to me that we may want to purposely create some completely 2D characters within Maya, or characters that are partially 2D and 3D like this one. It's true that there are other applications that we could animate 2D characters in, but we want the flexibility to be able to animate them in the context of a 3D scene.
There's been a lot of talk about different ways to economise, and the idea of creating fully rigged 2D characters in Maya seems to me at least, to be a good idea.
I have one more example to show, however it's a work in progress.
It's one of the workers from the Bassoon District.
I started by drawing the worker in Maya based on Julien's original sketch. They are simply nurbs curves. This didn't take very long.
The model on the right is the base mesh from which I could then create the profile lines. As with my other examples, I can vary the line width to create the sketchy look.
The base mesh took a little while to model (which is why a pure 2D approach might be more appealing for background characters or groups of characters).
However, the lines didn't take that long to create, now that I have a little script to take care of the technical stuff. I've simplified the workflow to - select any combination of curves and meshes, run the script, and we get thick lines along the curves and around the profile of the meshes. It also takes care not to litter the scene with lots of duplicate shaders, which is what usually happens when you apply strokes to more than one curve.
That's about it for today.
The next few things to think about is making a workflow that everyone can follow (executing a script is not the most user friendly way to do things). The workflow should also take care of scene and render setup so that everyone gets consistent results. I have toyed with the idea of making some sort of wizard that checks everything is setup consistently. I also need to think about how we rig these characters - in 2D and 3D.
Ethan Shilling
Evening Ethan :) Just dropping by to say how thrilling it always is to see the 2D characters translate - and for you to always talk so simply about what it is obviously complex and made to look simple on account of your years of experience. Re. workflows for 2D characters... I've asked Nat Urwin to throw her hat into the ring re. animation, so it maybe Nat has some ideas too on this front. I'm assembling the Avengers!
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