FANTASTICAL CREATURES - BRIEFING

This session introduced us to our newest character design unit, looking at our own Fantastical Creatures.

This task is to teach us how to create our own characters and then create a 3D version of it, either as a puppet or a CG model; I will be going with the latter.

Our list of deliverables this time includes:

• Turntable - a clip of our creature turning around
• Composited photos - 3 edited photos of our creatures incorporated into provided backgrounds
• Cast sheet - a cast sheet of creatures with a block background

Since I'm working in CG (specifically in Maya), the list of things we'll be doing for the process of designing our creatures is:

• Modelling
• Basic Sculpting
• Retopologizing
• UVs
• Texturing
• Rendering
• Compositing

This unit will be 5 weeks of term time (+3 weeks of holiday time), of which 4 of those weeks will be CG specific. There will be taught sessions, as well as independent work and research into the animal form, design iterations and process.

After getting all this down, our tables of 4 got a large sheet of paper, and we got to create as many creatures as we wanted! Using different materials and colours was encouraged, so I tried to use as much as felt necessary.

(My creatures (from top left clockwise), Johnathon, Camelelelelol, Skollcrabbe, Stabcat, Buzzcut, Lil' Boi, Steveñ, Bjord and DigDog.)

I tried making my creatures look like they'd fit in with my style, but also tried venturing out with the weird creatures idea. I haven't designed creatures in quite a few years, so it was a fun time going back to it! 

After we all finished our creatures, we went around the room, putting hearts on which creature one person designed we liked the most. When I got back, I found two with an equal amount of likes: Steveñ the Screaming Mushroom Mutant and Skollcrabbe. And I've got to say, I certainly really like Skollcrabbe too! Steveñ, as funny a design as it is, just doesn't feel like a good fit for this task. I think I'm going to go with Skollcrabbe going forward with this task.

Next session, we're moving on to sculpting our creature out of wire and Super Sculpey, which sounds like it could be really cool! This session, in all, was really fun! It was nice to get back to 2D drawing and making whatever characters we wanted.