Monday 12 November 2012

Punch Bag character designs

This is the first of a series of regular reports on my new film; Punch Bag.This is being made at Staffordshire University in Stoke-on-Trent, where I am a Senior Lecturer in Animation (Twitter: @25fpsstaffs).

It has been some time since I have made any animation of my own, I have been teaching for about five years, but prior to that I was a freelance Animator working in London and Manchester. This will be the first animation that I have made using Maya.

The designs are simple silhouettes. I have moved on from the previous Steam Punk designs but have retained a lot of the influences. There is a human engineer / mechanic, and a lot of robots.




The robot was put into Maya as an image plane and I started start sketching the shape in with polygon primitives. I will pit lots of grabs into the next post.

The human character will be sculpted in clay as a maquette first; then photographed to become a series of image planes in either Maya or Mudbox. I will probably use Maya to keep the poly-count down.

The human is very much inspired by the Team Fortress II characters...



...while the Robots are all me.

The 'look' of the whole thing will be very like a Mike Mignola comic; BPRD and Hellboy are my inspiration...



 ...Toon Rendered to create lots of flat colour, with large areas of dark shadow; very Film Noir.

More soon...


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