Redesigning Frank/Character Sheets

I recently started to redesign the main character in Chris’s short film. This decision came about because we needed to design something that was workable and fairly straight forward to model. In the light that character modeling is quite difficult my brother and I decided that it would be better to design a character on the lines of Mr Incredible rather than going with a more realistic character. This would make the rigging and modeling process easier. However, Chris still wants his character to have the same traits. The difficult part will be translating these aspects into a stylized form. We also came to the conclusion that by creating a more stylized character would be quite appealing in contrast with the very realistic setting.

I started out by making a few character busts in Zbrush to get an idea of the characters facial build and tone. Mr incredible influenced me because he is the embodiment of a middle-aged male who is slightly overweight. When designing Franc’s face I tried to accommodate for all the elements that Chris wanted. For example I wanted to bring out some strong shapes and forms that would indicate that he was a professional boxer before he became a hit man. I had the idea that he would have a pronounced, strong chin and a prominent brow. I was very pleased with the outcome and I really got an element of character appeal. The character appeared as if he was a strong person while his expression indicates certain despondency, which was what I was looking for. I presented the material to Chris who really liked the stylized look of the character. I used the models I had created in Zbrush to create a character sheet that we could use when modeling the box model of the character. The character sheet is essentially a guide when modeling to acquire fairly accurate forms and shapes. I will be using the character sheet to literally trace model the main character. The character sheet took a little more time than expected but would help me tremendously when trying to model the mesh in Maya.