Showcase 2024 - Marion Boitelle

Creating a character: ANGIE

Meet Angie, the personification of Anger! This little girl is part of a bigger personal project of mine, with characters embodying the Stages of Grief. This work is still in progress but I was eager to showcase it, as I have handled all the various steps, from concept art to animation.

Researches

Here is a selection of sketches and researches for Angie, with predominant characteristics: little frowning girl, huge red face as if constantly yelling, pointy eyebrows, pointy clothes and accessories and messy red hair with ponytails. The coat and the hair designs are inspired by flames, giving the feeling of an impulsive and chaotic troublemaker, ready to get fired up. Her features highlight her childishness, though this character is also sensitive, hot-blooded and easily overwhelmed by her emotions.

Sculpt and modeling

I sculpted the body and the hair in Blender and modeled the clothes in Maya. The retopology was made in Maya too. For my first time modeling a complete character and its clothes, I tried to keep the latter on the simplistic side, to balance the visual information coming from the pointy extremities and the hair.

Texturing

Inspired by a rising fire, the reddish color palette (in her clothes and hair) guide the eyes from her feet to her big face, where her emotional outbursts will manifest themselves the most in animation. Some clothes are worn but neat, as if she had played wearing them before.

I learned a lot while discovering Substance Painter with this project, going for a semi-realistic look. The hair in particular was a huge challenge, yet it is supposed to be groomed later on.

Rigging and Animation

Angie's rig includes IK/FK set-ups for the limbs and the spine, as well as ribbons and IK stretches for smoother deformations. There are also: a foot roll, a foot bank and the option for the head to follow the neck orientation or not. The hair and the coat rigs are mostly made of FK chains and the skinning was pretty challenging, mostly due to the fact that I had modeled the curls beforehand instead of leaving it straight. They should become nHair dynamic chains in the future to add physics simulation, as hand-animation needed a fair share of pose-to-pose sculpt to correct disgraceful distortions. As it is, the coat is not usable for any kind of action where the legs move widely.

The facial rigging was the longest part, with stretches and squatches, local sticky controllers, deformation and corrective blendshapes. The eyelids rig needed a lot of driven keys because they were not well-adjusted compared to the eyes meshes. All in all, the rig is pretty compliant and it would be great to go further.

What next?

I definitely had a lot of first times and learning moments with this project and there is ground for improvement. The texturing and rigging parts were a bit too rushed for me and need refining. The clothes and hair in particular were really challenging and might need simulation over hand-animation, even more if the hair ends up groomed. This character was also supposed to come along with a plushie and different sets of clothes. 

I hope you enjoyed this journey along Angie!