Tuesday 27 November 2012

Character Model - Charon

It's been a while since our last update here, but we've been working pretty hard in the mean time. So I'm proud to present the model for Charon - which I've got far too much experience working on animation projects to actually call 'finished' yet, but certainly looking very much how he ought to. I did the rough model for him myself, but he was painstakingly cleaned up and polished by Kat.




Though his design is quite simplistic, it's pretty hard to get a model version of him looking just right - mostly, it was a pretty evolutionary process of modelling and drawing over the model pretty regularly to make sure the 3D version wasn't too far from the original vision. He's also got a set of skinny little bird legs under that robe, and even though you only see them in a couple of shots, it should really help with animating his walks and so forth believably.

The ghosts are almost there too, so hopefully we'll be able to showcase them here really soon! :)

Thursday 1 November 2012

Character Design - Cerberus

Did I mention we have ourselves Cerberus in this as well? We have ourselves Cerberus.


Cerberus is the Styx's resident Hellhound, a three-headed monster of fury, spittle and malice. Well, most of the time. Cerberus may be a demon, but under all that he's still just a dog. His job is guarding the entrance to Hell, but he's also at the beck and call of several denizens of the underworld - all they need do is whistle for him, and he'll appear in a puff of smoke and a smell of sulphur (and a faint tinge of singed dog hair). Once summoned, he's only too glad to snarl, bark a misbehaving soul into obedience.
 
Mostly, I based Cerberus on muscle-dogs, which all seem to be very front-heavy. He's based mostly on a bulldog and a doberman and I tried to keep his as graphical as possible. The horns are useful for telling the different heads apart; they act in slightly different ways, the middle head being something of a ring-leader while the other two seem more like hench-men. If the middle head could talk and told a bad joke, the other two would definitely find it completely hilarious.