Headless Update: getting the right style

Its been a while since I posted about the Headless project and a lot has happened.

Being the director and art director on this project i have had a lot of work to do and have found myself telling people what to do more than working specifically on anything. Of course the main role of the director and art director is to keep everything looking the way that i want it and for the story to say what i want it to say and being caught up in doing the animatic and storyboard constantly i have done the character designs quickly in order to get the characters modelled so they can then be rigged. But it wasn't until i looked back on my original designs that i realised the 3d models didn't look anything like the original concepts i created.

here is the turnaround i did for the head.

And a few stills of the 3D Model in progress Created by Alan Ation

then the finalised 3D Turnaround of the head.

After looking at these for a while thinking there was something not right about the character i realised that they where far from the original concept that i did myself. Just being caught up in doing everything else i missed over the important aspects of my original design which i liked so much. So i went back and studied my original concept thoroughly. 

Looking at this and having it stuck to the side of my monitor i soon realised what was missing in my first head character turnaround. It was the small things like the positioning of the eyes, ears,mouth and nose. The shape of the ears and how square they are, the shape and size of the eyes and so on. 

To gett a better idea of how this concept to be created in 3d i got my hands on some clay and created this head character as a real 3d object that i could continue to look at for reference and understand more how it could work. 

Although This was a very quick clay sculpt i was happy with the outcome and it helped me see where i went wrong and how it could be fixed. 

The next stage i took was to re create this clay sculpt in Mudbox as a 3d sculpt that I could refine even more.

This Sculpt was simple but achieved the more innocent and charming character that i was going for and as you can see from the old and new next together the change made a difference and is now more like my original design.