In this course you will explore concepts and approaches involved in creating successful character designs that can be applied to video games. Following a first week delving into some foundational concepts for successful character design, each of the remaining three weeks are structured as a "master class" where you will observe three professional character designers at work in the studio: Andy Ristaino (Adventure Time), Jacky Ke Jiang (Journey), and Robertryan Cory (SpongeBob SquarePants). Each designer will take on two different design challenges on the fly and address the various issues in designing characters for games, such as movement, expression, and technical limitations. At the end of each week you will have an opportunity to try out some of the concepts from that week's lesson on characters of your own design. This is a fun and engaging class especially useful for students interested in animation in film and TV as well as games, and is suitable for students of any drawing ability.
Refining the Pig
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Do curso por California Institute of the Arts
Character Design for Video Games
542 classificações
California Institute of the Arts
542 classificações
Curso 4 de 5 em Specialization Design de Jogos: Arte e Conceitos
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Week 4: Find Your Character
This week, we see Robertryan Cory in action. Cory is an a character designer known for his work on shows like SpongeBob SquarePants, Ren & Stimpy, and Gravity Falls.
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Fran KrauseFaculty, Character Animation
School of Film/Video
The passes that do they are not just nonsense.
A lot of that was figuring out how does
this actually look when it is rendered out in comparison to a little sketch.
And then through that, you can see a lot more problems.
And so one of the things that I start going through and
anyone can do this to any design.
Again, a lot of the stuff I will be talking about won't just
be I don't want people to think like oh well this is a thing for
animation or this is for fighting or whatever it is.
You can do it, you can do it to a twinkie wrapper.
So, when you know what you need people to focus on,
there's a clean up technique that you can use.
And that is, so, I want his body to be the biggest shape.
I want his mass, and stomach to communicate he's this big brawler.
He's a bit cocky.
And one of the things you can do in all design, is that,
what your focus is, you can actually go over and render outside of the line
to create more mass, so I'm cleaning up just outside of the line,
and just by doing that in this and
I can actually go in on the arm, so maybe you can off shift it a little bit so
I don't want to lose the mass on the shoulder so I'll go on the outside.
Of this line for the arm but then I need it to taper a little bit.
So, go on the inside, here.
By doing that, right away, you end up getting slightly
higher contrast in your designs.
You can do it on, like I said, you can take one of your favorite artist's,
you know, pieces of work and you can improve the contrast on their design
relatively fast by doing that little technique and I kinda
do it as I'm cleaning stuff up too, myself; but I don't want to lose my focus.
One of the things, I was putting little marks on here which is like
Another thing I think about when I start going through it,
is I start going, like, I always draw way too many details, when I first start,
and I always go, and I don't need half of this stuff.
Because so much of it,
it's like, is it necessary, to communicate all of this stuff.
So, I will take things and another concept of design is that
organic shapes work well in details of one, three, five,
seven, and you can go to nine but I don't recommend it.
And then mechanical details work well in two, four, six, eight.
10 and what that means is if you're drawing a tank and
you put two bolts next to each other it adds that element of mechanic to it.
It's the symmetry.
It makes things look dead.
But then what you can do is if guys like Moebius and Masamune Shiro
[INAUDIBLE] he would,
they would add organic details to mechanic things,
to make them almost look alive, and then on Spongebob what we would do is we
would add mechanic details to organic things, to make it look more humorous.
So, it's double stripes that are even and symmetrical, and
that's kind of just like Naturally what you do.
But as I'm going through this,
what I will be doing is I'll be going does it need this much detail?
And right away on the legs,
I'm thinking man I don't know if I need to break it off.
So, I have two bumps here and I will just be trying out
Is it necessary, can I do it in one shape rather than two.
And seeing how that looks as I do it,
and seeing how if it can even function.
Because another thing I have to make sure is that it can be modeled
that's not necessary for just showing a little bit, but
it's something you should be thinking about as a designer.
Don't think about is it a good drawing, think about does it serve it's purpose?
And if your purpose is that this is gonna get modeled, and rendered and animated And
a lot of times you need to go,
is this mask even something that I could rotate around and stuff?
So, you just think about that stuff a lot.
And you end up thinking a lot of like, okay.
Is this too difficult for somebody else to replicate?
I hung out with a programmer recently from Seattle, and
I was telling him I grew up around a lot of programmer.
One of my friends is a programmer on League of Legends,
and he was my friend that I grew up with.
And he was coding is a lot like design where it's the brevity,
like the thing that impresses people in coding is like, oh wow,
you figured out how to compress this into, you know, something that was 18 lines,
into, you know even they get impressed if it's down to like 16.
They're like, how did you do that?
And so I was telling him about it.
I was like, oh yeah it's kind of like in design in how he, we do that too.
And he's like, well now the way coding works is more of like
canvas code be handed off to someone who's never coded before or
has very limited coding experience.
And it's so elementary that it doesn't how much, cuz they can fit so
much information now.
Now, it's more important that you be able to communicate it to somebody who
maybe does have your knowledge and
I feel like maybe design is heading towards that way too.
It's so simple.
That anybody else can pick it up and things that be coming
the the culture are almost all things that are very simple
and almost could be replicated, but maybe not exactly.
There's a lot of that fad art is what I'm trying to say,
but there's something that speaks to it, I think.
So, I'm just trying to find certain shapes.
We can move onto another animal in a second.
>> One thing I'm curious about with this design is there's so many round forms.
And I have a lot of trouble designing of a character that's this
round because when I try to do it often times it'll start feeling marshmallowy.
>> How do you balance that much roundness in a character?
>> Well, I guess I want it to communicate
that it's round because I want the pig shapes.
If I get into too much.
If I get into too intricate of shapes too,
that is kind of talking about that programming thing,
which is that I want someone else to be able to take this and to duplicate it.
A lot of the balancing I used to do a thing,
sorry, I'm jumping all over the place.
Let me try to [INAUDIBLE] one of the things I used to do when I was starting
off as [INAUDIBLE] I actually do almost like a wire frame on something.
I would find the shape on it and I would come in, and
I would actually put the wire frame to make sure that things wrapped around Now,
I don't do that as much because I kinda like have an innate
ability to look at something and see the construction.
So, a lot of balancing out of like, shapes that even if there's a similarity
of bulk pattern going on and that,
I'm basically seeing the form in it, I mean, that belly button may not be exactly
there but it's almost where it would be if I was to render exactly out and that just
comes from years of designing where you go okay this is kind of where it goes out.
But I started it all off by originally
Doing almost all of the work, drawing through shapes.
Making sure things connected.
But I'm just trying to communicate the shapes right now for
the camera of like, okay, this is the balance of everything.
Cuz Whether this gets done as 2D or
3D it wouldn't even matter at this point.
Cuz the shapes are basic enough that they could work in either one.
And that's kinda what you wanna do in everything you're working on.
Is don't get caught up in the illustration part of it,
just like the underlying shape and the function of it.
Hopefully that's making sense.
>> One thing I'd be curious about is thinking of
the flexibility of the characters >> Expressiveness, like,
this is a character when they're kind of most cocky, and
I'm wondering as your designing,
how do you know the characters you have, do you test out other expressions?
Yeah, I do, I mean, if this was something that
you were following me at work I would probably do
a bunch of like things where I would sit down and
I would you know, stretch it all out and
like figure out like how much of this how can I move and
I would need to know more, like, gosh, more like
Okay, this is for a mobile game.
This is for a 2D animation series.
Whatever the rule set is, then I would start going okay.
If this was gonna be rendered in 3D, I'd have to go okay,
now I have to show the under part of this.
There's all that kind of stuff, but >> I would realize,
okay, well I might have to move this mouth over here.
And it might always be like, right now I'm giving it a slight impression.
Because we talked about him being a little bit cocky.
But I could technically just put it there and
you would just go okay all my expressions have to go within this rule set.
And then you just kind of mess around with it.
Sometimes you would just take post-its or you can do it on.
It doesn't matter how you would do it but you would just go
okay these are the parameters and now how much of this can I just move.
With cg stuff you tend to just move eyebrows and mouths.
The other stuff you don't really move a lot.
And then with 2d animations, obviously you can move a lot more and
you can get more expressive.
I almost specifically work in expression in hands.
It's a technique I learned when I was younger.
Which is like, once you get those two down, almost everything else comes in,
the character comes around it.
So, once you figure out this kind of stuff you can
kind of just start playing with the expression a little bit.
And that's just the animation part of it where you're just
kind of playing with the shapes.
This is kinda the basic under watch, let me finish up these feet,
of where I would probably be moving the design, but I might still come in and
This might not be the thing that I would present to someone, actually.
This would be the starting point of where I go,
okay this is kind of feeling like a character to me.
It kind of has a little bit of the wrestling, like Jim,
he's got the top hat that's like okay, he's kind of a slob.
But I might circle himm does it communicate like
the wrestling pose part of it.
Right now he's kind of like more gimmicky and kind of thing.
So, one of the things I would start probably doing is after that I would
start messing with that, I would do the different kinds of expressions and And
trying to find, what is, does the thing communicate what I need it to communicate?
And a thing that you would bring to an art director or a producer would be,
I would do a couple passes where I would figure out, okay,
maybe I get rid of this, maybe I maneuver this around, maybe I put in a pose.
And what you do is you organize it, it's a whole game of manipulation,
this whole industry.
What you do is you take your second favorite drawing and
you put that up front in your presentation.
And you never put your favorite upfront, you put that second and
the reason why is you, you don't want to put your worst stuff up front because then
they become highly critical of everything that they're about to review.
But you don't want to put the first one because they will
almost never go with that decision and
they will always end up going oh no this is kind of interesting but.
So, that's why they tell me don't fall in love with your designs.
They, you want to, somebody will come in and
I will think I have solved every problem.
>> Mmm. >> And they'll go,
you know, I just don't like square teeth.
Can we see how, and then, in your mind,
you can go Square teeth are absolutely essential for this design.
There's no other way, and you've just, you have that tunnel vision.
And then they're coming in and they were like,
can you take the teeth from this one design and can you put that and can you?
Like, sometimes you have to read through that and
a designer will be like, what are they really trying to communicate?
They're telling me square teeth don't work here and
they're coming up with a simple solution.
And I'm like, why is this?
So, then you have to go back.
I feel like that, when you're doing revisions like that you end up kind of,
like I said a lot of this job is trying to figure out like,
what is this person who's not very good at communicating trying to tell me?
And the best directors are the guys who do the little sketches that are really rough.
Because when you see those guys,
they can tell you really quickly what they want and zero in on it.
And the worst directors are the ones who are like I don't know,
I was thinking about this, and they're talking about a lot of concepts.
And you just like go back to your desk and go oh my God.
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