Character Designs, ideas & changes

Based on my early pre-production drawings I originally was going for small scaled characters which were inspired by these toy figurines from the early 2000s though I later realised they weren't practical for having multiple different characters, so I decided to make a major design changes and started looking back at some of my other inspirations

One other reason for changing was they proved to be difficult when paired with the style & scale of the cars though i decided to carry forward the overall urban idea that drew me to them

My second inspiration was from Captain Underpants movie by Dreamworks. Many of characeters are also small in scale but I looked at these for ideas primarly surrounding the facial animations and the way they used blend shapes in a very simple and seamless way which gives it it's comic appearance.

As I want to combine a 2D flat style appearance with 3D, I had a look around different 3D animations that gave this impression from front facing camera angles. I decided on a design choice that would make development and rigging a lot more effective also for having multiple characters, the idea would be to have a basic body which all the characters would have and then have the heads as separate component which swap-able ears, noses and headgear. This idea was taken from Disney Pixar's Mr Potato head came in useful in the sense that it could be applied in a practical manner for creating more than one character in a short production time frame. The appearnce from front angles worked well with ears facing directly forward as you would get in with 2D characters, and from the side would show off the flat areas against the three dimensional. The last aspect that intuigend me was how Disney used so many different approaches to character rigging in Toys, like in this instance we also have 2D planes that navigate around the eyes, which is specially useful for oval shaped eyes.

At this stage I'm not entirely sure whether my characters will need te use of this method but I decided to experiment with it and create my own. Currently the eyes of old characters are basic spheres that noticeably protrude when viewed at side angle. This was a design choice as I mention because I wanted eye tracking to be made very clear from a distance especially from a side perspective which is a recurrent shot in the animation. Although I've made this design I've also considered other eye shapes which may also work well. I followed a tutorial by Ross Reagan on how to create arcane practice of eye rigging that is useful for abnormal eye shapes, he also demonstrated the same methods that were applied are possible to create rigged eyelids as well as seen on Mr Patato head, this is something I may experiment with further if I decide on going with this style.