Cartoon character questions related (your tips & opinions please)

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hello All!
I’m very new to the world of Blender and to this amazing community.
I do have experience when it comes to 2D Animation (that’s my job) but in the 3D area I have so much to learn so maybe you guys can help me out here. :slight_smile:

I’m modeling my first cartoon character in order to rig and animate in Blender. I’m going for a very basic character and probably the rig will also be very simple and hopefully easy to control (not sure yet, I just got started).

I may have many questions during the progress of this “experiment” but I will start with a simple question:

2 main object V.S. 1 main object
The character should be very simple: Big head, small body (no fingers at all).
but I wonder if I should make the BODY (include arms and legs) as one piece, and the HEAD as 2nd object. (maybe join eyes, teeth to the same object).
OR… would you recommend me to model both the Head + Body as one object?

What would you suggest from your experience and why is it better (for animation purposes of course).

OK… before you answer, I want to explain something from my 2D experience, which I would like to “convert” into 3D now that I’m learning Blender.
Usually on my “simple” cartoons that I make on my free time (that means my videos on my YouTube channel) have 2 main character designs:
1 - Small body big head
2 - One cubic shape character (body and head are the same piece)

Both designs have no fingers at all.

Anyway, my brain tells me to do the same process I would in 2D… in Blender, and it make sense in a way but since there is more than just modeling… there is also the rigging part, I’m a bit confused and would like to avoid errors.
The most important thing for me is that I will have total freedom when I will start animate the character, so it won’t “break” or anything because of the way I modeled it, that is why I’m asking you guys. :slight_smile:

Thanks ahead for the help and I’m sorry about my bad English.

You can see a good example to the concept designs I’ve mentioned above in my cartoons:

Example for the “Small body big head design”:

Example for the “One cubic shape design”:

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Those are great.

IMO the question is no so much whether to model the head,body and legs as separate objects as it is whether they should be connected as a single manifold (or mostly manifold) mesh. Consider 3 scenarios: A,B, and C. A and B will have the same exact end effect, C is fundamantally different.

A) The head,body,and 2 legs are 4 separate objects. Separate objects, by definition, are not connected. So the legs can move independandtly from the body without deforming it at all. There is a single armature which controls all 4 objects.

B) The head,body and 2 legs are a single object but they are (Again) not connected. Again the legs can move independently from the body without deforming it. A single armature controls these unconnected parts.

C) the head,body and 2 legs are single object and are connected, and mostly manifold. You would use something like automatic weights and moving the leg would deform in some manner the hips or the leg/body area.

Most animated CG characters are C. That being said, I think in this case, seeing your character style, you may be better served keeping them unconnected.

But keep an open mind and don’t rush into the creation. It’s possible you created these characters partly out of knowing your original 2-d medium and their form was partially dictated by contrainsts on time and simplicity.

So that being said, and knowing your background as an animator, and seeing your first animation and the huge skill and potential you have, I would urge you to reconsider your characters and work on something closer to a pixar style character.

The prerequisite stage for something like this would be to gather a reference sheet of similar styles you want, and create some concept art. Concept art is tough for some people. You are not one of those people. I guess what I’m saying is, the 3-d nature of this medium is such that you should give heavy thought to it’s potential, and not worry about trying to translate directly from the old medium. That’s my deep thought for the day.

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Thank you very much Photox for your very detailed reply!

The thing is that I consider this character (if I’ll be able to make it from start to end including animation) as an experiment.
As you already know I’m very new to this, but I like learning by playing around with the software, still I can’t play with something that have so many ways to do many things, that is why asking here for opinions from skilled and experience people like yourself is very appreciated and let me understand there are many solutions to one issue and I can choose the one I feel more comfortable or easier for me to use.

So that being said, and knowing your background as an animator, and seeing your first animation and the huge skill and potential you have, I would urge you to reconsider your characters and work on something closer to a pixar style character.

WOW! thank you for your kind words but pixar style character is WAAAAY above what I can do at this moment, don’t forget I’m using Blender around 2 weeks now… and not every day so before I jump that high I really want to try simple things like these example character I’ve showed above (not the best example but the most simple I could think of). This is very faltering, thank you for believing in my skills I hope that I will be able to create amazing character animation using Blender, that is my main goal by learning how to use it, your words are very encouraging I appreciate it a lot!

I want to model a simple character, then see if I can actually animate this character to do whatever I WANT IT TO DO (sounds little bossy right? hehe) if this will work… I think I’ll be very happy to move to the next level, but first I must experience the very basics and a basic character should be a great way to solve problems whenever I’ll ran into… and I bet I will, I already have many questions that I don’t know how to deal with and I’ll probably post in here the progress hopfully to get more tips and opinions.

I must mention that in my daily job at the studio I mess with many different styles, but my personal favorite are 2:
1 - The simple cartoons (twisted creatures mostly).
2 - Anime which I would LOVE to get into it using blender because I have so many ideas that are more “serious” looking designs than the cartoons designs, some of even creepy in their own way and stories… (I’m flooded with original scripts and ideas but I’m not there yet).

Some of the designs one day I may animate in Blender… it’s not really Anime, but it’s not a typical “funny cartoon” style:

MDI__by_Alon_Dan---001a.jpg1280×720 196 KB

MDI__Truth-EMET_by_Alon_Dan.jpg1280×720 64.1 KB

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It’s funny, for me, it would be more difficult to make these types of characters than full 3-d ones. I haven’t done much in this or a similar style, and I personally see a tougher road. What program(s) did you create the original animations with?

Some food for thought:

You can use the 2-d artwork in blender. You use an image texture on a plane. The image must have an alpha channel ( like.png) and your character is full color, and the background is tranparent. So you can layer raster images on top of one and other. General rule of thumb is to use an image texture twice the size it will be rendered in the frame (At it’s largest point)

Also you should look into freestyle. Freestyle is a method for drawing black outlines around your renders. It has many options, and can draw contour lines and more.

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I think that I have so many tools that I may try in Blender such as cloth and hair… and oh Yeah! one thing that I’m interested is that “Freestyle” rendering, I think if I’ll understand how to control it well I’ll be able to get an interesting 2D cell tones and also… it will probably render much faster compare to realistic renders and materials… but it’s only a guess I’m not sure.

I wonder if there are differences in Freestyle from the BI and Cycles… I would love to learn how to use it soon.

I’m using an old software called Mirage, I do all the 2D in it include composite effects so I skip the move into a softwrae like After Effects.

About the 2D in blender, I’ve been thinking about animate in 2D PNG Sequences (with alpha channels): mouth shapes, eyes and maybe use them somehow over the face of a character, I think it may be interesting but from specific angles it won’t look as good as a real 3D Geometry mouth or eyes… so I need to consider this technique. (again, I have no clue how to do this I just think about many solutions and styles I can combine).

So many things to learn! :smiley:

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Yeah there’s definitely a lot to consider. One question I keep coming back to in your case is this:

What effects and visual magic are you hoping to achieve in the 3-d versions that you wouldn’t be able to do (or do easily) in your 2-d workflow?

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Great question!
During the years I’m animating in 2D I always asked myself: “Is there a faster way to tell my stories but keep the quality high and smooth”?

The answer was NOT changing the 2D Style to “cut out animation” or any other pipeline because it will change the look of the designs and most of all the animation itself, the movements and the way I want to tell my stories, I always know exactly how they should look like (in most case I’m the director of the creations).

So… I know in basics how 3D works, and I know it will look different than the style or look I design in 2D but than I ran into many inspiring examples of 2D Cell shaders and realistic as well, and I had to check it to see if the animation itself is easier to do.

When you mess with 2D Animation drawing frame-by-frame (in two’s combined with one’s in my case) every second of the most simple animation take so much time!
And it’s not ending there, there is always the extra time for rendering (yes, believe it or not… it’s not slow as 3D but it’s there). and editing, etc…

The main reason I want to get into 3D is to focus on animating my very own stuff, and I simulate the situation of a short production in my head, The examples are roughly numbered and considered in ONE-MAN-PRODUCTION pipeline, means everything by one person:

IN 2D Production:
1 - Starting from animating a sequence in a rough sketch, if I need to fix something… it’s not just moving a keyframe like in 3D dope editor… it’s to actually draw again and again, in my case I animate in a different way to avoid these but still there are lots of work to accomplish.
2 - Cleanup stage, draw the outlines over the rough sketch layers.
3 - Every single frame have few layers (in my type of production as other studios have more):
Outline, Base color, Tone, Deeper Tone, Highlight, Shiny.
4 - Drawing / painting high-res backgrounds (sometimes from many angles) it’s the stage I hate most because drawing stills is something I don’t like to do it bores me, I love animating better. Background usually go to outside artists in big production but I’m talking about ONE-MAN-PRODUCTION in this case. This stage takes a very long time and without it you can’t go further.
5 - Composite effects, edit, rendering the master.

As you can see every single frame have lots of work to do, so a few seconds of animation take lots of time.
BTW - I do everything using paperless technology (Wacom Cintiq).

IN 3D Production:
1 - Modeling, Texturing, Lighting the scene will take time. That’s true!
2 - But once I’ve done #1 I will bey focus on animating.
3 - Composite, edit, rendering the master.

The main attraction is #2 the animation process, especially after I’ve animated my very first movement in Blender with no experience in that area it was MUCH faster and felt natural to do.
I still believe that if my rig won’t be “dynamic” with specific features I won’t be able to animate what I want it to do as I usually imagine in a 2D production.

Conclusion:
It took me many years to master my very own pipeline in the 2D area, and as everything else I’m still learning new things every day.
I think if I will master first the specific things in Blender for 3D animation, I may be able to produce animations faster and keep the high quality (I’m a perfectionist when it comes to my own creations so… yeah that’s a problem).
I’m aware that Render time in 3D is a big deal… so time consuming for the end result will take lots of time, but production of animation will be twice faster than 2D or even faster? (I don’t know for sure… I’m still a newbie in the area)

In both 2D or 3D I don’t think a lazy person can never be an animator hehe…

Not the best example, but just to have a main clue on my pipeline for small productions: (no painted background in this case)

8

I understand a bit more now. I think I’ll ask you some more questions to better help you design a workflow:
----------\

  1. 2-d animation (say of a mouth talking) uses a series, often with 3 images, of the various stages of openness. There is no interpolation between them, they are open, middle or closed.

Q:
a) I am probably interested in continuing this type of jerky effect, with pixel level control on each frame.
b) I would like to have a more fluid and interpolated look to the mouth animations, with more intermediary frames.

  1. Shading

Many of these images have false two tone shading usually a more saturated main color and the desaturated, darker shadow. The line between them aliased.

a) I want to continue using a two toned appraoch and I will draw the shading for each frame.
b) I am interesting in experimenting with 3-d toon shading and having more gradations in between.

  1. mirage
    Can mirage export pngs or tiffs with tranparency?
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Don’t forget that whatever I’ll do in Blender first will be just experiment in order to learn how I can use the tools, so it’s not really for a so called production I may do in the future.

OK, hope I can answer these:

  1. 2-d animation (say of a mouth talking) uses a series, often with 3 images, of the various stages of openness. There is no interpolation between them, they are open, middle or closed.

Before I continue answering, I must mention that in my case it’s not 3 images… it’s much more smooth with many frames opening a mouth could take few frames, and from Ah to M… is a total few new frames and from one to other more drawings.
Think about it like how the shape-keys do the work for you in Blender, in my 2D workflow I do it manually.
And no… morphing the frames to create inbetweens doesn’t look as good as real frame-by-frame, believe me. :wink:

So (b) is more the direction I go, If I’ll create a rich library of shape keys it will allow me to do an amazing dynamic job while animating and I can’t wait to try it!

  1. Shading:
    (b) is probably the right one, I’m curious what I can do in order to create the exact tone or style I’m looking for.
    it will also may include (a) in it because I believe I will have the option to emulate it, right? (remember, I never actually try any of these tools in Blender yet).

  2. Mirage
    Yes, it can export anything with 24bit and 32bit PNG with Alpha (transparency) I use it for many other purposes for T.V. Broadcast projects such as uncompressed sequence rendering to put on the editing software for maximum quality.

Your suggested questions are great to ask myself becasue it’s really up to what kind of LOOK or STYLE I want in production X… I may want realism in something else so the answers will change related to what I’m looking for.

10

OK… had some time to continue working on the “simple” (not for me, but for you guys sure it’s a simple one).
As you can see it’s very basic, I didn’t got into more details yet and I’m not sure how many details I’ll add at the end.

Anyways,
The goal is to make it works good for animation so back to the original dilemma:

1 - Make it all 1 piece by connecting the body (torso) to the head using join/merge (or even start from the head and extrude a new torso).
or
2 - Just grab the head (eyes + teeth) to the torso and continue?

I’m thinking to extrude the arms and legs from the torso, they are supposed to be very small compare to the head and have no fingers.

Your advice? What will work better? any explanation why you suggest me to go on #1 or #2 will help me for future characters in the same style. Thanks ahead! :)

Alon_Dan_WIP---001a.png992×840 104 KB

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Whenever you have a rigging or modeling question, post a screenshot in edit mode so we can see the topology.

It is more common to model the body as one mesh, although there is no law that says you have to. It is possible to have a single armature control a character made up of several objects.

The big question you ask yourself when joining two objects is: can they share the same modifiers? Modifiers work on per obejct basis. Many modifiers have an option for vertex groups so that you can limit the influence to those vertices, but not all modifiers allow this.

So I would recommend joining the neck and head.

It is common to leave the eyes as separate objects. Eyes can be rotated (and keyframed) around their own object origin (the center) easily and it’s not even necessary for simple things to add bones to them.

You can also built fancy eye rigs with a single “gaze” bone some distance away from the head, so both eyes can be moved by moving a single bone. I wouldn’t worry about that, or try to build one yet,

The teeth it’s kind of up to you. On a realistic human it’s more common to leave them as separate objects, on a cartoon I would probably join them with the head. The reason being is that in cartoon’s the teeth may move around in non realistic ways and it will be easier to make shape keys affecting both the lips/mouth and the teeth if they are one object.

I tend to try and model bodies as one mesh, using a mirror modifier (with clipping checked) and extrusion. You will get into less trouble doing that way. You don’t want to run into a situation where one body part has 12 verts in the loop and the one you want to connect it to has 26 verts.

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Very helpful reply my friend, thank you so much! :slight_smile:

The reason I didn’t put the edit mode as extra is to focus on the suggestion on a general issue for future projects and not specific on this one, but I understand it is always better for people to see the topology of course.

I actually had to stop work on it because of a new project at the studio (bummer… just when the character start to look like… a character!) but I can’t wait to continue here and there, and I’ll do my best to update in here the progress and of course… more annoying newbie questions will come from me.