CAGD117 Character Design

In my animation and game development major called Computer Animation and Game Development (CAGD), I had completed a project where I created a character based on a world created within a group. We were given a few weeks to create our character. We had to go through multiple phases on creating our characters. And I’m here to explain it and show my results.

I mentioned this in another post I had made, but to start off, We had to create our character on paper. Coming up with the personality of the character and information of them, including height, jobs, age, gender, things like that. At this point, no drawings should be made. Just focus on the character’s personality and traits.

One the ways to create a good character is the use of something called a character diamond. Character diamonds can keep your character from not having too many traits to be an overly complexed character, and from having less traits to make the character simple and generic.

Here is some information of my character. Once I had gotten his personality made, I was able to gather pictures that could use as references. The images could be used to match the character type and personalities, also can match the type the world they live in. Once a bunch of reference images is gathered, then you can move on to actually draw some designs!

It’s good to make a good bit of sketches where the character is different from each sketch. No need to go above and beyond with the art. Just basic designs of the character would be great.

My character is a medieval brawler and my first idea was for him to be a badass fighter with a trench coat on. It was a lot more of a struggle to start off with his design, and I struggled even more with the second drawing. I didn’t really know what I was doing with it, but I wanted to have my character look more poor, since he grew up in a poor home. For the third drawing, I wanted to make him look like a wanderer with some battle scars. I tried my best to make it the best looking design as I could. And I really liked the outcome. Then I tried the fourth one to attempt to add a bit of armor into it.

I was aiming to work towards finalizing the fourth drawing, creating line art for it and using it as the final design, but my friend gave me a suggestion I should try: she said I should mix a bit of everything into one and see how It looked. I attempted it and came with this:

This was my final design. I loved it so much, I kept it and continued to work forward on the design process. I kept the same pose, pants, and head from the third sketch, the idea of a trench coat from the first drawing, band aid straps from the third and second sketch, and I had an idea where in the fourth sketch, he had a black skin tight shirt. I wanted to keep that within this final sketch, and with all that, this was created.

The next thing to do is to color, but I also had to work towards making head images of the character showing many facial expressions. Once those were created, everything would have to be colored in and then all I had to do next was to add the bio and some information of the character in something called a character design sheet. Character design sheets are used to show off the character, showing the many aspects and emotions expressed from the character. Character design sheets are used a whole lot in the animation and game development industries. So I was tasked to do so for the final piece within this class.

This was my final piece. I spent a long time to complete this work, prioritizing it more than other work even. One of the big things in an industry like the gaming and animation industries is that you shouldn’t get over attached to a creation. If the idea had to be canned or changed, one that would be over attached would feel devastated and even upset. I was, and still am overly attached to this design and luckily, would not have to worry about anything bad to happen to this design. I will continue to work towards this design to make it as best as it can be on my own time.