Where have I been? and Character Design Week 2

I suppose you've all been wondering whats happened to me on blogger. Not a post in days. In fact not a post since I gave it a shiny new make over. Well what can I say, I've gotten a little bit behind with it.
I think the slight delay in the first Maya tutorial lesson due to unforeseeable networking problems threw me off course a bit. All that's left to do on the Maya tutorials is the end part of the first car tutorial and the second tutorial.
I'll make sure that first thing tomorrow I'll try to get all the Maya stuff done and post it. I have also been experiencing some playblast issues on the mac with the lip sync tutorial. It all plays in sync in Maya, but playblasting seems to go out of sync.
At first I wasn't sure whether that was Maya that was wrong or the playblaster, so I did a test render and matched it up to the sound and everything seemed to be in sync. Which basically proves that playblasting on a Mac seems completely useless, does anyone else have this problem? Nevertheless, doing a quick preview render is a reasonable alternative so no worries.


On to character design

________________


I felt that I had a better experience in the second character design session. We were asked to create henchmen of the evil something or other. (can't remember who but it was some random name so its kind of irrelevant)
But before this we were shown how different types of characters were constructed out of certain types of shapes. Circles, squares and triangles.

Characters made from circles we tend to associate with cute, soft, harmless and basically safe. For this reason a lot of characters designed for young children tend to be made up of circles.

Then characters made up of squares look solid, unbreakable and well built. This is your classic hero.

Which leaves triangles. Triangles are sharp, which can be associated with danger. This kind of explains why most bad (as in evil) characters are almost always angular and in some cases tall and skinny.

So we were asked to create henchmen. So although they are generally bad characters, I more thought that they are going to be strong and stupid. Or else they wouldn't be taking orders from an evil genius. For this reason I focused more with squares, but played with a few triangles and circles. There are a few random characters as well on the character sheets.




OK so they're not masterpieces but at least I felt more confident when putting pencil to paper this time round.

As far as project work goes, I'm still trying to think up a better story. Along with plenty of other things I would like to get some more work done on character design over the weekend.
This weekend is basically the weekend where I catch up with everything!