Cartoon Critters: How to Stylize and Create Animals - Emu

Hello! My name is Yaroslav Primachenko and this tutorial is all about designing cool looking cartoon animal characters.

Design and Sketching

The first thing you need to know is how you are going to make your character unique and recognizable. This is really the first and main goal you want to achieve. You could do a great job of the modeling, spend half of your life on the lighting and texturing, ruin your health while setting up the render through sleepless nights, but if the design doesn't work, neither will the image. So let me walk you through the process of designing my Emu character and explain the basic principles I used while creating it.

The first thing that makes the viewer pay attention to the character is its silhouette - its proportions and contrast. And I'm not only talking about the contrast in color, but mainly the contrast that defines the basic shape of your design. Strong characters can have a very small head and legs, but a huge body and muscular hands. This is just an obvious example; there are millions of different combinations, so think of them when designing your characters. Make it visually strong and recognizable so that it works even in a low light or strong back-lit situations, when the beautiful color or all the lovely details that you put into the character really doesn't make any sense. Take a look at some really successful characters and ask yourself what makes them work. Try to analyze and understand the principals they are built on. But don't stare too much, especially right before the designing process - you could end up copying someone else's work. Do it in your spare time - when watching TV, eating your cereal, talking to other people or planning an evil plot against the world!

First of all I searched for some reference images of a real emu. What I liked is that its feathers look like hair both on its head and body. I checked the internet and found out that emus have much softer and more flexible feathers than other birds. I thought that it would be a good idea to exaggerate this feature. I had several ideas about the main proportions of the body and after some thinking I decided that the first design in Fig.01 was the one I liked best. Though I liked the idea of making the head of the character very big, or making it hardly visible, I didn't like that it made my design look too childish or created the situation where the face would be very hard to read.

Fig. 01a

Fig. 01a

I started with some quick pencil sketches (Fig.02). As I didn't need to present them to a client I made them quick and dirty. The main goal at this stage was to work out the basic proportions of the character, its silhouette and facial features. I also had to give it a stylized look whilst making sure it remained a recognizable animal. I quickly moved to ZBrush as I find ZSpheres a unique and handy way to create basic topology and work out the proportions and silhouette of a model (Fig.03).

Fig. 02

Fig. 02

Fig. 03

Fig. 03

Detail

I converted the ZSpheres into a mesh and continued working on the character. I decided that my character should have hair so I made a mesh to represent it and blocked in the main parts to better understand the proportions. I also decided that my character should have some kind of scarf on as the references of the emus had a lot of hair around their neck, as if they were in constant fear of catching a cold (Fig.04).

Fig.04

Fig.04

I moved the model to 3ds Max and continued working on the design by blocking out the big parts but not concentrating on the details. This is also the time when I started thinking about the color of my character. Though natural emus are a gray/brown color it would not be the best solution to leave it like this and so I decided to change the color scheme. I roughly colored the character and it seemed okay to me (Fig.05).

Fig. 05

Fig. 05

After that I made a draft render and took it into Photoshop. I added some details quickly, just to have a sense of what the finished character could look like. I was very aware that my emu looked a bit like a chicken (don't get me wrong - I like chickens). I also didn't like the proportions so I made some improvements using the Liquify filter in Photoshop. By the way, for those of you who can't find it anywhere you have to download it separately for CS5 from the Adobe site. As far as I remember it was included in the standard CS4 pack. But this is one of those "must use" plugins when designing a character. It means you can quickly and easily change the proportions of your model without having to spend much time on it. You can use this chance to spend 15 minutes thinking about where you want to head with your character, then you can remodel it later. It is always a good idea to exaggerate the key features of your character as it will help people to relate to your design better. As you can see I have made the neck and its legs much thinner and the body smaller, thus adding a desirable contrast to the character. The combination of a heavy head and huge feet on a thin neck and legs makes the character look the way I wanted it to (Fig.06). And now it didn't look like a chicken! Great!

Fig. 06

Fig. 06

Choosing Colors

I continued to work on the design in ZBrush, improving and tweaking it and starting to add some detail (Fig.07). Some people add color to the character only after finishing the modeling process. I like to do it earlier than that as color can tell you a lot about the character's personality. For example, dark color combinations are for bad guys, whereas light colors usually express good and friendly characteristics and contrasting combinations of blue, red, green and so on are for superheroes. From time to time I turn off the diffuse to see the geometry clearly, but most of the time I work on the two together.

Fig. 07

Fig. 07

I like to use the ZBrush UVW Master for the draft unwrap; it's a really a brilliant plugin that saves a lot of time. I usually fix it a little to make it possible to use more of the UVW space and make it easier to paint extra details in Photoshop later. I make some test renders in 3ds Max with hair to make sure all the parts work well together.

There's no magic behind the texturing process, you just have to keep in mind the final design and make the color work best for it. Don't try to use millions of colors from the beginning. First, fill the main parts of the character with solid color and if it works nicely then start to add variations and all the details you need. Remember that your character will look better if it has one dominant and a few complementary colors. When designing the emu I decided that it would be a character that basically looked cool and slightly evil (hence the teeth) though not very clever. So I mainly used bright and saturated combinations as the base color, but also added some blacks (Fig.08).

Fig. 08

Fig. 08

Detailing Your Design

Clothing can tell a lot about your character, such as its background and habits, so don't underestimate this part of the designing process. Though it should be recognizable without any clothes on at all, this is a good chance to exaggerate some of the key features and add extra detail. For example, torn and dirty clothes can be used for poor characters. The eye patch and a wooden leg is what makes a pirate a pirate! Well, of course it shouldn't always be that obvious. Remember Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and how he used to be able to tell the background story of a person just by looking at him and analyzing the small details of his clothes? That's how you have to be - like Sherlock Holmes, just with only one difference: you have to tell the viewer through the details, not guess. I decided that my character would be a bit of an emo. I didn't want to depict it fanatically, but just wanted to give a sense of it.

Lighting Your Design

Though the lighting may seem like it is something that doesn't directly concern the character's design, the truth is you can tell a lot through the way you light your character. You can make it look more evil by lighting it from beneath, or mysterious by lighting it from the behind. The lighting and atmosphere should reinforce the character's personality.

Well, after saying all that I should be honest and tell you that in my case the lighting was rather simple. I wanted to stylize it to make it look like an amateur photo with over-burned areas, noise in the shadows and all the stuff you usually see on the internet when people try to take photographs of themselves. After some thinking I admitted that it wasn't the best idea in the world as I not only wanted the picture to be funny, but of a good quality too. The lighting set up looked like this (Fig.09). A V-Ray light for the main fill light, and three spot lights with attenuation - one for the rim, the second for the key light source and the third for some additional backlighting. I also added a plane under the character with a radial gradient in the material's opacity channel, so that the floor kind of fades away to the edges of the picture.

Fig. 09

Fig. 09

Finishing Your Design

I didn't use many post effects on this image. I rendered the scene in several separate layers - Specular, Reflect, Hair, Ambient Occlusion and so on - then combined them using Photoshop. I added a few texture layers on top of the image to add some depth and take away that digital look a little. I created the new layer, set it to Soft Light and drew some extra highlights using a soft brush just to make the image pop a little more (Fig.10).

Fig. 10

Fig. 10

Conclusion

I hope you learned something from this tutorial and found it interesting. Thank you for reading - now it's time to go and make some designs to rule the world!

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