Making Of 'Chipi'

Introduction

My name is Miguel Ângelo (a.k.a Malanjo), I'm a CG artist at Ingreme (www.ingreme.com), in Portugal, and I will do a simple tutorial (suggested by Chris ... thanks Chris and all 3D total team for the chance), for the construction of "Chipi", a cartoon character for a TV Spot (Chipicao 2006), made by Ingreme team and directed by Tungsten.

Concept

Before starting to model my character a good tip, that I always find useful is to always start with a concept sketch, this way you can plan out how you will go about modelling and setting up poses etc. Below you can see the concept sketch for this character.

Modelling

After I have observed and analyzed the concept, I began to model. I start off, at the most important part of the a cartoon or any other sort of character, and that is the head. To create Chipi's head, I'm using the technique of poly modelling with some primitives and modifiers.

When the head was finished, it was time to finish of the model by creating the body, making sure that I paid particular attention to getting the proportion of character right. If in such cases when you come to create your chosen pose and you are finding it difficult finding reference information regarding this, what I tend to do is use one biped (from character studio or CAT), and shape over it, using it as a wire structure.

Following a tip of 'to do a particular part of the body you have to draw the general form and then later refine in with all the smaller details', which I was taught by a my teacher at College (Teacher Cláudia Amandi), I started to shape the T-shirt, modelling the basic form, and later adding in all the detail and adjustments.

So here is the finished T-shirt, with all the details that I have added. As this is a cartoon character, you don't necessarily have to make it look very realistic and react as it would do in real life. What is more important is getting the final look right for your character.

Continuing with the modelling and using the same theory as above of getting the general shape and then add all the detail after, I continued on to create the sleeves for the T-shirt.

Finishing up the upper body, all that was left to do was to create the hands. As you can see from the image below, I started of by using the skeleton biped of the CAT to get the general structure of the hand. To point out when modelling characters, it's important to have the character in a natural pose. Here the arms and hands are slightly folded and in a characteristic pose, which will later go on to help with the Rig setup, which was made by Rui Romano as well as the final animation.

The following step, is about creating the pants and the feet. Using exactly the same technique as I used to create the T-shirt, I created the pants and later the shoes. After this, I came back to modelling the pants, and to adjust the detail around where the pants and shoes meet.

For the shoes, I used one spline as a guide, in creating the mold of the sole.

Finishing up the modeling phase and having all the structure of the character sorted, I only thing that was left was to create the knapsack, as Chipi has a knapsack where they leave the gifts and the products. To create this, I have used the same technique as I have used for all the other parts of model.

Texturing

With the whole model finished, it was time to do the texturing where I have used the excellent 3DTotal textures CD's. Below you can see the textures that I have used for this project.

I made one quick render, nothing final, only to show the model. The final light of the Spot was different. Here is the light setup, as well all the Vray's presets.

I want to be thankful to all that have been involved in this project, as well to 3DTotal team.

You can see the Spot in: www.ingreme.com (Portfolio>3D>"Chipicao Promo").

Best regards

Malanjo

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