Chef

As this is a cook he must have good hands and forearms while being a little chubby because of his depression about work and his bad nutrition. To help refine this design we have looked out a lot of information concerning chefs and during the research, I thought it would be a good idea to imagine that he was now working for the new burger company as a delivery boy which would explain his outfit. Another example, to keep this kind of retro atmosphere, we thought he would be wearing Converse shoes, with reference the film “I robot”, throughout the film. Other big contrasts that we can notice on the Chef is the remote control that is on his sleeve, which is a symbol of the future and also his retro helmet that bring back the old values. In terms of physical characteristics, the fact that he is depressed is shown by the fact that he is slightly tilted forward. The character has to seem tired but still lovable. That is why his whole shape is not very sharp but to support the fact that he is very tired, his facial features are more pronounced. The fact that his bust is very large and impressive with a small head shows that he has some good in him, the size of his torso indicates that he can be very open to people. His legs being a lot smaller and thinner makes him seem not aggressive at all and makes him look a bit lazy. A last thing that I wanted to show is a very characteristic nose that is closer to an animals nose than to a human nose in order to make the character look more real. For this I was especially inspired by the drawer of Black Sad, Juanjo Guarnido and also by some Disney movies.

More examples of "Blacksad"

Other inspiration:

Sketches:

Robot

For the robot, a lot of data sources were used. The goal was to give life to an object in the simplest way. In this case, the robot had to tie in with the combative consciousness of the chef, so we based ourselves on a pepper mill that would more than everything like to be used again. Some key elements that we can see on the chef will also be recognizable on it like for example his eyebrows, sideburns or maybe his beret. We did not want him to have any futuristic elements because he has to bring old values forward because he is supposed to incite the chef to love things like he used to. To keep everything simple, I tried to find some robot elements that were good. For example, in “Number 9” and “The Iron Giant” the eyes are simple and they do not need to have wards to be expressive. Taking “Robots” as reference I noticed that one key element to show emotions in animation was the robots eyebrows. So I took this in consideration for the design of this robot too. Concerning the general design of the robot I wanted to do as he was build from already used objects like a pepper mill, metal, tissue, leather and a spoon. To do it my inspiration was a sculptor named Stephane Halleux who makes sculptures in a particularly attractive style as “Number 9” where the robots are made entirely with salvages.

Stephane Halleux's website

Inspiration:

Sketches:

Semester 2:

Before the study:

Here are the final chef modeling, textures and rig.

All of these to discover what the technical problems are in the character creation process from a 2D character design to a 3D setup for animation.

The rig has been done in Maya following a tuto from an animator who worked at Disney. It's my first rig in Maya but the results are quite good. The problem is that the jacket of the chef is really wide for a setup without using a cloth system, or a muscle system. The skinning took a lot of time but still less than the rig.
You can see the hierarchy bellow.

Others problems appeared; when the Chef has to tilt his head forward, his chin gets through his jacket. In a better world, I know I'd have used nCloth for example. We didn't have enough time to learn it in Maya. But for a first full production experience with this software, it is not so bad.

Technically, for the modeling, the hand works well with the rig as the rest of the body.

I created a few blendshapes to see if it was easy to create inbetweens in Maya for the eyes. But it wasn't useful to create more expressions. It didn't serve the dissertation of Arnaud and me.

After that, I made some rough colour tests to begin the texturing of the chef. We decided to choose the grey one (character 6) to support the story. He had to seem the most depressed possible. I showed the colour test to 6 people, 3 of them (3 girls, (interesting strange phenomenon)) chose the grey one. The others, 3 boys, picked different colours.

You can see the result of this quick texturing without using any complex shaders like SSS due to the lack of time. (It wasn't useful for our research project) But I compared a little what could have been created in 3D instead of texturing and vice versa. I depends on how realistic we want to be. (for example strings or seams)

The final result is satisfying.