Work in my own time with Dan Goodman

While starting my initial work with Applied I was very focused on doing a lot of hand drawn animation and not much character design, so myself and Dan wanted to do some more sort of practice in the areas that we wouldn't be touching in the next few months. Dan wanted to practice his modelling and rigging, making rigs that would be strong and wouldn't fall apart while i wanted to get better at designing characters for 3D and my 3D animating.

I found inspiration in the design of the Faun from Pans labyrinth as its a very interesting creature that had a lot of different textures and extremities making it a really interesting design and something interesting are to begin with, to make a character thats like, an element or a fae characterised.

Taking the Faun as inspiration i created my own horn being that was very reminiscent of the creature and i didn't feel like as a character it had personality or life, it was just very dull and boring as a shape and design.

The idea was to get a complex design that dan could be a bit more challenged with so i gave it an extra set of arms along with the horns and flexible ears and tongue. This meant he'd have a complex rig to work on, I did have to look into how a human body could fit two extra arms and decided to put them back to back rather than one on top of the other as i didn't want the body to become elongated but rather for the top half to be a more dome shape.

 

I did a few alterations and redesigns to the character but i wasn't liking it, the character didnt have any personality to it and was very lifeless. I think this was because of how much detail went into making a humanoid body with a muscle structure to it. Dan however really liked how it looked but i wanted something that had a more interesting silhouette.

Since i was making characters which were akin to elementals i tried a fire elemental based heavily on the lava woman from Moana and the character Moana herself. Dan really liked how she looked and i definitely preferred her to the previous character but she still had that boring silhouette and character design.

Before doing a T-pose for the Lava Lady i tried to do some designs for a new earth creature with a much more cartoony feel but dan said that he wanted to do the lava woman and that what he really wanted was the chance to practice sculpting textures and making strong rigs that won't break.

I did a digital turn around for Dan to use as reference when modelling separating the main body, the lava textures and the dress into three separate layers so he can see the different levels of the character. I also added notes of my thinking that could be done or iterations that needed to be made such as the hair being weighted like heavy lava and dripping when she moves.

Finally as he worked on the model I started doing some character poses and this is when i really started to see the character come to life as i started to draw personality into her as she interacted with the lava and showed different expressions.